Suicide: Guidelines for Assessment, Management, and Treatment

by Bruce Bongar (Editor)

Each year almost 30,000 individuals take their own lives, making suicide the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. The data on completed suicide become all the more disturbing when one considers that completed suicides represent only a small percentage of the number of attempts;
that suicide may be statistically underreported; and that the rates of suicide in many industrialized countries are increasing. Suicide has likewise been found to be the most frequently encountered emergency situation for mental health professionals, with clinicians consistently ranking work with
suicidal patients as the most stressful of all clinical endeavors.
Combining the clinical experience and practical recommendations of some of the world's foremost authorities on suicidal and life-threatening behaviors, Guidelines for Assessment, Management, and Treatment is designed to fill the current gaps in the training efforts of the mental
health and health care disciplines in the area of working with suicidal patients. The chapters are constructed as modules that cover a specific topic in a basic curriculum on suicidology, and include workable practice guidelines that are both essential and up-to-date. Topics include theories of
suicide; epidemiology of suicide; biological research; understanding child and youth suicide and suicide among the elderly; procedures for detection of high-risk factors; emergency room care; hospitalization and its alternatives; psychopharmacological treatments; psychological assessment; cognitive
and psychodynamic approaches to working with suicidal patients; training and supervision of mental health professionals in the study of suicide; postvention, malpractice and risk management; and forensic issues in suicidology. By bringing together in one landmark volume the cumulative clinical
wisdom of many of the pre-eminent experts in suicidology, this book for the first time provides the practitioner and practitioner-in-training with a set of clear and useful guidelines for working with the suicidal patient in clinical practice. As such, it will have broad appeal to psychologists,
psychiatrists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and other mental health professionals, as well as to primary care physicians, nurses and other health care professionals.

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 29, 1992

About the author

Dr. Bruce Bongar, Ph.D., ABPP, FAPM, received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California and served his internship in clinical community psychology with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. For over 25 years, Dr. Bongar maintained a small practice specializing in psychotherapy, consultation and supervision in working with the difficult and life-threatening patient.

Past clinical appointments include service as a senior clinical psychologist with the Division of Psychiatry, Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, and work as a clinical/community mental health psychologist on the psychiatric emergency team of the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.

Dr. Bongar is past president of the Section on Clinical Crises and Emergencies of the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association, a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology, a fellow of the Divisions of Clinical Psychology (Div 12), Psychology and the Law (Div 41), and Psychotherapy (Div 29) of the American Psychological Association, a fellow of the American Psychological Society and of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, and a chartered psychologist of the British Psychological Society.

Dr. Bongar has also been a winner of the Edwin Shneidman Award from the American Association of Suicidology for outstanding early career contributions to suicide research, and the Louis I. Dublin award for lifetime achievement in research on suicidology. In 2008, he was awarded the Florence Halpern award by the Division of Clinical Psychology of the American Psychological Association for distinguished contributions to the practice of clinical psychology.

Since 2001, he has also become interested in the psychology of mass casualty events and suicide terrorism. From 2002-2005, he was the founding director of the National Center on Psychology of Terrorism.

His research and published work reflects his long-standing interest in the wide-ranging complexities of therapeutic interventions with difficult patients in general, and in suicide and life-threatening behaviors in particular.

Reviews

[Robert Bogue]

There’s a yearning on the part of those who have encountered suicide.  It’s a yearning for answers.  Answers to questions like how can I know that someone is at risk?  What do I do to minimize someone’s risk?  And how would I treat someone who is at risk for suicide?  These are the questions that Suicide: Guidelines for Assessment, Management, and Treatment seeks to address.  Like the other literature on suicide, there are no clean, simple answers.  There are only rough markers that delineate the edge of our knowledge about suicide.  This is the exploration of what we know and the awareness that it’s not enough.

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