“I am afraid I might actually do it,” the 31-year-old woman told me. Abigail (not her real name) was referring to ending her own life. For years she had struggled with depression, and she teetered on the brink of suicide. Medication had helped her only minimally. Her ideation was unquestioned and her plan was clear.

These were frightening words to me, and for weeks I held my breath, fearing a phone call from her husband announcing that Abigail had completed suicide. A brief hospitalization had somewhat stabilized Abigail’s life, but she was worn out. Upon her release from the hospital, her husband and I worked together to form a safety plan in an attempt to ensure that he wouldn’t be left a widower and her two children left motherless.

I have seen many clients like Abigail over the span of my career as a licensed professional counselor. Managing clients who are suicidal is a common occurrence in therapy. Data are scarce regarding the percentage of suicidal clients a clinician in general practice might have. However, most of the numbers indicate that up to half of an average client caseload is on the worrisome side of the suicide risk continuum. That percentage is far greater, of course, among clinicians who work with specific populations or disorders that have been shown to have increased risk for suicide. Abigail fell into one of these high-risk categories. Yet as recently as 2006, a meta-analysis by Stefania Aegisdottir and colleagues published in The Counseling Psychologist basically indicated that clinicians aren’t very good at assessing risk. That is frightening.

Equally disturbing is research showing that about one-quarter of us will experience the loss of a client to suicide during our careers, but many (if not most) of us are poorly prepared to manage suicide risk. In a 2013 study by Cheryl Sawyer and colleagues of 34 master’s-level counseling students, 15% reported no confidence at all and 38% reported little confidence in their ability to assess for suicide risk, whereas only 3% reported feeling fully competent to manage suicide risk.

But the problem isn’t just with graduate counseling students. In spring 2017, I presented a workshop for my state professional counseling association’s annual conference. The workshop focused on assessing risk of harm to self or others. I asked the 85 or so participants if they regularly worked with clients who were suicidal. Every hand went up. I then asked if they felt that their training had adequately prepared them for assessing suicide risk. Only two people in the entire group indicated that they felt prepared.

This response is consistent with an article titled “Psychologists need more training in suicide risk assessment” that appeared in the April 2014 Monitor on Psychology. The article, which detailed a task force report and summit organized by the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), said in part, “After three years of study, the AAS task force … called for accrediting organizations, state licensing boards, and new state and federal legislation to require suicide-specific training for mental health professionals.” The article went on to say that “many psychology graduate students are trained only on suicide statistics and risk factors, not in clinical methods of conducting meaningful suicide risk assessments.”

Something is amiss. Not only does it appear that mental health professionals receive inadequate training in this area, but some researchers even question whether the little training we do get has any efficacy. Robert Cramer and colleagues, writing in 2013 about suicide risk assessment training for psychology doctoral programs, stated that “no existing training methods have been investigated specifically in traditional clinical or counseling psychology training settings and samples.”

Although the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders addresses suicide risks by diagnosis, it does not provide any risk assessment tools for clinicians. Given the picture I’ve painted, how can it be that in 2020, we do not have any clear standard — often referred to as best practices — for suicide risk assessment?

Looking back

To identify what blind spots the counseling profession might have, I try to imagine what people will say about our field 50 or 100 years from now. After all, it is easy to look at the past and recognize our errors and oversights. As developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan wrote in Three Seductive Ideas (2000), “If you had lived in Europe as the fifteenth century came to a close, you would have believed that witches cause disease … and that pursuit of sexual pleasure depletes a man’s vital energy and guarantees exclusion from heaven.”

These ideas sound ridiculous today. If you are younger than 30, the following facts from the more recent past will sound equally ridiculous to you:

• If you were a mental health person in the 1930s, “moron” and “idiot” were formal classifications of what we now call developmental delay. In addition, you believed ice water baths and jumping on a person’s chest could cure schizophrenia.
• If you were practicing in the 1950s, common treatments for depression included prefrontal lobectomies. Some physicians literally lined patients up and performed these barbaric procedures in 10-15 minutes each.
• If you were practicing therapy in 1970, you believed that homosexuality was a mental illness. Just a few years ago, some people believed in and actually practiced praying homosexuality out of a person (one of the milder techniques used in so-called “conversion” therapy).
• In the early 1980s, hardly anyone had heard of AIDS, stalking, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, or autism.
• When I was in graduate school in the mid-1980s, none of my master’s or doctoral professors even mentioned what we now call “evidence-based” therapies. Cognitive behavior therapy was leading the way, but most of us described ourselves as “eclectic,” and after our supervision hours were satisfied, we all basically did whatever we thought worked.

The lack of exactitude in the mental health field doesn’t end there. When I was a regular lecturer at the FBI Academy in the 1990s, I began receiving calls from around the country about various applications of counseling to law enforcement. One call came from a sheriff’s department. Five officers had been involved in a shooting, and departmental procedure required a fitness-for-duty assessment. The sheriff was asking me to do the assessments, so I began researching this facet of risk assessment and discovered there was no standard whatsoever in the field regarding fitness for duty. It was simply a judgment call on the part of the clinician. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Apparently, we have a lot to learn. I’m hoping that in the not-too-distant future, therapists will be saying, “Remember back when there was no standard for suicide risk assessment? Unbelievable!”

Risk assessment tools

It would be easy to confuse lack of a standard with lack of tools. We have lots of tools. Among the assessment tools commonly used are the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation, the Reasons for Living Inventory, the Suicide Probability Scale, the Suicide Intent Scale  and the SAD PERSONS scale, to name just a few. However, there is very little, if any, data clearly demonstrating that one tool is better than another or that assessment tools have any efficacy at all.

One exception is the Beck Scale for Suicide Ideation, which is as well-researched and as validated as any instrument available. But there is still no assumption that clinicians use “evidence-based” assessments. Does that sound a little crazy to anyone but me?

In a 2016 article in the Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, Keith Harris, Owen Lello and Christopher Willcox identified a number of issues with the standard practice of suicide risk assessment, but again, there is no consensus in the field. The authors noted that “an American Association of Suicidology task force … and other experts have called for improved teaching guidelines on valid risk assessment. The findings of this and related studies bring to light weaknesses in current suicide risk assessment and conceptualization, and concerns that some clinical educators and practitioners may be unaware of the limitations of popular tests. There is a clear and present need for updating core competencies for accurate assessment and risk formulation.”

How do we know our assessments are effective?

I’ve never lost a client to suicide, and it would be tempting to suppose that this indicates my system of suicide risk assessment and intervention is effective. However, there are multiple factors unrelated to my competence that might lead to the same outcome. For instance, clients who come to counseling might simply be more motivated to live than those individuals who don’t come to counseling. In such cases, perhaps any adequate therapist would have been effective.

There may be other factors in my clinical work that are the cause of my fortunate success. In other words, perhaps I have been doing something else that works (maybe good rapport or social support), but I’m not aware that this is what is actually helping as opposed to my suicide assessment and intervention. And, of course, I could have been wrong in assuming risk at all. These potential false positives could mean that my clients didn’t kill themselves because they weren’t really suicidal to begin with. And these are just three possibilities.

This is why we need research and standardization. Standardization adheres to accepted research format. My students often start comments and questions with “I think …” or “I feel …” I never let that slide. I don’t care what we think or feel. What do we know? That is what research — evidence-based practice — helps us answer.

I understand that my words may be hard to hear. Before evidence-based therapies became the ethical standard, all of us in mental health were doing what we thought worked. Any challenge to our practice was met with a defensive posture, and I was among the clinicians taking that stance. We felt or believed (just like my students) that our methods worked because our clients appeared to get better. We were certain we were right, and maybe we were, but we had nothing concrete on which to base our assumptions. That seems obvious in hindsight, but the thought was new to us at the time.

Some of our clients might have seemed better but really weren’t. Their desire for improvement might have masked symptoms, and we also know that clients want to please us. They might easily have presented their cases in a brighter light than they should have. Other times, they might have been better temporarily but regressed after terminating therapy. We can easily misinterpret our positive feelings about our work as evidence that it is effective. Could we be making similar mistakes right now in risk assessment for suicide?

A perfect case in point is no-harm contracts. One of the things that clinicians seem to agree upon widely is that there are benefits to using no-harm contracts — also called safety contracts — with our clients who are suicidal. Yet years of attempts to validate the efficacy of no-harm contracts have turned up nothing. M. David Rudd, Michael Mandrusiak and Thomas Joiner Jr. noted in a 2006 article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session that “no-suicide contracts suffer from a broad range of conceptual, practical, and empirical problems. Most significantly, they have no empirical support for their effectiveness.” A 2005 article by Jeane Lee and Mary Lynne Bartlett reported the same thing. In other words, the one thing that almost all of us do has no data supporting its efficacy.

What we risk

When I’m working through clinical issues, I find it helpful to think of what I would say if I were sitting in front of the ethics committee of my licensing board or if I were being scrutinized in court by a hostile attorney. How hard would it be for an attorney to find 10 clinicians who would propose that I made the wrong decision? If all you can say is, “I thought this was a good idea,” then you have a very weak defense.

In such cases, we risk losing a lawsuit and perhaps having our licenses censured, suspended or revoked. The more important risk, however, is that we might fail our clients and they might lose their lives when we could have served them better.

A standard approach

I’m not the first person to notice this problem, of course. AAS, among other groups, regularly focuses on the development of reliable and valid processes for assessing suicide risk, but as of yet, the solutions are elusive. A number of research studies have attempted to address the issue. James Christopher Fowler summarized well in a 2012 article in Psychotherapy when he wrote, “We are not yet in possession of evidence-based diagnostic tests that can accurately predict suicide risk on an individual level without also creating an inordinate number of false-positive predictions.” This summary brings us right back to where we started.

Combing through the research over the years, I’ve narrowed what we know about risk into a three-factor risk model and five components of risk in my assessment process as a starting place for evaluating the efficacy of risk assessment. I’m not supposing that my work is original or that my system is better than another. I’m only proposing that what I present here is consistent with what we know and that it can serve as a starting point for collecting evidence and producing a standard of best practice.

Three-factor model: The three-factor model proposes that clients are at risk or protected from risk in three global arenas: presenting factors, personal factors and protective factors.

Presenting factors include diagnoses (depression, for example), loneliness, divorce, prior attempts, suicidal ideation and other situational factors that put clients at higher risk for suicide. 

Personal factors include pessimism, weak problem-solving skills and minimal coping skills that put clients at higher risk for suicide. Included here are actuarial data. Some populations, such as female African Americans, have been shown to have very low risk for suicide, whereas others are statistically very high (e.g., Native Americans, male Caucasian teens, the elderly).

Finally, protective factors counterbalance presenting and personal factors. This would include healthy relationships, strong social support networks and religious commitment.

Moffatt’s HM⁴: The model for assessing risk that I use addresses all three factors. My HM⁴ model has five components of examination — hopefulness, method, means, motivation and mitigating circumstances.

The research is clear. People without hope are at high risk. Sometimes this is called “future orientation.” Regardless, the question is, “What does my client have to look forward to tomorrow, next week or next year?” If the answer is “nothing,” then I’m worried.

Method refers to one’s plan. The more specific and clear the method, the more I’m concerned. “I sometimes think the world would be better if I just didn’t wake up” is a vague plan. “I have been collecting my mother’s medications a little at a time. I have them hidden in my room, and I plan to take them all at once when everyone leaves for work and school” is a very precise plan.

Means has to do with the tools to be used and the ability to carry out one’s method of dying by suicide. One of the children in my practice once said he wanted to kill himself. His method was to invent a robot that would kill him in his sleep. His method was clear, but the means of executing that plan were completely unrealistic. Even if he could have invented such a robot, the likelihood that he would be able to carry out this plan without attracting his parents’ attention was minimal. On the other hand, teens and adults often have much more realistic means and, because of freedom of movement and access to weapons, drugs and other resources, are much more likely to succeed in a suicide attempt.

Motivation refers to the level of desire to follow through and complete suicide. Fortunately for us as counselors, most of our clients don’t want to die. Their motivation is low even though their emotional pain is high. This is why suicide hotlines work. People are so highly motivated to find a solution (having low motivation to complete the act of suicide) that they will call a complete stranger to seek help. 

Finally, mitigating circumstances are issues that are so weighty that they override the other areas of assessment. Mitigating circumstances can either increase or decrease risk for suicide. My concern for a high-risk client might be overshadowed by the person’s religious beliefs about suicide or by their desire to avoid hurting their children, spouse or parents. “I couldn’t do that to my children” is something that I’ve heard many times from high-risk clients. “My uncle committed suicide, and it devastated my father’s family” is another. Readers might recognize that hope is a mitigating factor, but it is such an important one that it has its own place in my model.

Assessment of Abigail

Abigail’s risk was clear. She was in a high-risk gender, age and diagnostic demographic; she had been contemplating suicide for a very long time; and she had a clear plan. She had been in emotional pain for many years and, most frightening to me, she had little hope of anything ever getting better. Her efforts to improve and the efforts of others to help her, in her estimation, had been futile. She had purchased a poison specifically to have it available if she decided to kill herself (method), and it was presently in her possession (means). I am positive she was motivated to follow through because getting the poison was not easy. She was willing to work hard to prepare for her own death, so I could have little confidence that she wouldn’t follow through. 

Among several mitigating factors in Abigail’s case was that she loved her children and didn’t want to abandon them. Also, she was certain that her religion did not permit suicide, and she feared “an eternity in hell” if she killed herself. Also working in her favor was that she possessed at least enough hope to keep our appointments. She was willing to at least try to let me help her even though she was unsure it was getting her anywhere. She came to therapy several times a week and was willing to trust that life might improve. Finally, she pursued medication for her depression and continued to engage in the business of life. 

Abigail is still alive today, and even though she struggles at times, she reports that she is doing better, that her depression has been managed, and that (now a grandmother) she is finding some happiness in life with her grandchildren.

Conclusions

If I sound overly critical of our profession, it is unintentional. It isn’t that I think we don’t know anything about suicide and risk assessment. On the contrary, there are mounds of data on statistics, risk factors, assessing and so forth. I attended a fantastic education session on suicide risk assessment at the American Counseling Association’s 2018 conference. The session was packed out, the presenters were fabulous, and the information provided was very helpful, but the very nature of the workshop demonstrated that we lack clear standards. Nearly all of us seem to be asking the same question: What do we do?

Without a standard for suicide risk assessment, clinicians face two very serious risks. The first and most important is that failure to standardize may leave our clients at risk for self-harm. Just because we have individualized systems that we believe are working doesn’t mean that they are working. The second issue is self-protection in the event of a lawsuit or a complaint against us with our licensing boards. The existence of best practice standards would allow us to defend ourselves.

Although there is no standard assessment for suicide risk currently, it isn’t beyond our grasp. In the 1990s, the medical community began looking at the use of a research-based protocol in emergency room heart treatment. Malcolm Gladwell described this process in his 2007 book Blink. Physicians resented the simple three-question protocol and were incredulous that anyone would suggest that such a simple tool could offer better triage than their professional experience did. Yet data proved that the protocol was superior in saving lives. The protocol is now standard in the medical field. The same process can be achieved in our field as well, but it depends on our profession’s willingness to study it and to accept the results.

 

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Gregory K. Moffatt is a veteran licensed professional counselor of more than 30 years and the dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Point University in Georgia. His experience includes three decades of work with children, trauma and abuse, as well as a variety of other experiences, including work with schools, businesses and law enforcement. He also writes the monthly Voice of Experience column for CT Online. Contact him at Greg.Moffatt@point.edu.

Counseling Today reviews unsolicited articles written by American Counseling Association members. To access writing guidelines and tips for having an article accepted for publication, go to ct.counseling.org/feedback.

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