This Month in Psychopharmacology

Suicide Prevention

This month is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month. NEI had the privilege of interviewing Dr. Christine Moutier, Chief Medical Officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), for the latest NEI Podcast episode. In this interview, Dr. Moutier shares helpful resources that are available on the AFSP website, from the top scientific findings on suicide prevention, to how to become more active in the community and participate in walks that raise money to support suicide prevention research. She discusses how to identify warning signs in patients, resources for preventing suicide, effective evidence-based interventions for suicide prevention, and how to cope with patient suicide.

Here is a preview of the transcript:

NEI: What would you say are some things that could encourage mental health providers to speak out to each other, and do you think that perhaps opening the door to conversation and letting them know that they’re not alone, is that something that’s considered helpful?

Dr. Moutier: Absolutely! Actually, we view this kind of discussion and collaborative sharing and support for the experience of losing a patient to suicide along the same trajectory as learning how to do suicide prevention as a clinician, because it can be so traumatizing that it can actually inhibit our optimal ability to work with patients at risk for suicide. So, this is so important and I’m so glad that NEI has raised the topic and that it has had some ongoing dialogue. We find the same things to be true, that the history, unfortunately, is one in which our own field had stigmatized the issue of suicide, and had such a great degree of misunderstanding, perhaps with an over-exaggerated expectation on the clinician to be able to predict who is at risk, and to be able to predict the exact moment, and therefore to be able to prevent suicide 100% of the time. I would just give an analogy, that in the field of cardiology, cardiologists don’t expect themselves to be able to predict who will die of a cardiovascular event, and when they will die, but that does nothing to stop them from utilizing all of their prevention strategies and all of their treatments to go after risk factors for mortality due to cardiovascular disease, and we can do the same kind of approach very objectively with regard to preventing suicide in our patients. And I’ll just point out that there is one really significant resource related to the topic of losing a patient to suicide, and that is a resource that includes a slide set for teaching residents and other trainees about the experience of loss of a patient to suicide, and also includes a video of expert clinicians like Glen Gabbard, Jim Lomax, Sid Zisook and others talking about the experience, and it will really help to frame both the data that upwards of 50% of practicing psychiatrists will experience the loss of a patient to suicide in their career. Other mental health disciplines have a little bit less percentage that endorse that experience, but this is very, very common, and so I think many clinicians have kind of suffered in silence over many years and not talked about it because it had produced so much shame and trauma, but that doesn’t need to be the case.

>> Listen to the full interview and subscribe to the NEI podcast here.


For more information:

Recommendations for Suicide Prevention
Hope Into Action: Suicide Prevention (NEI Members Only)