Mood Disorders and Suicide Discussion

Mood Disorders and Suicide Discussion

To move some of our readings to applied and contextual themes, we will explore two elements of this chapter: suicidality and practicing diagnosis.

You are directed to the National institute of Mental Health’s website for the Ask Suicide- Screening Questions (ASQ) Toolkit.

Within this toolkit, there are several suicide risk assessments. Meaning, tools (a series of questions to ask) in order to access a person’s suicide risk. If you look at the inverted pyramid, you can see how the first level of assessment (meaning the quickest and shortest assessment, “briefest screen”) is the ASQ Tool.

Mood Disorders and Suicide Discussion

Under “popular tools” The next level of assessment would be Brief Suicide Safety Assessment. These tools are longer as they are meant to assess in more detail, incorporate more domains or areas to assess, and can be adapted to different populations, such as outpatient, youth, adult, emergency department, etc. In order to access these assessments, you have to click on the blue links under “Youth” and “Adults” You will then be brought to a page with links to all the assessments, and if you click on them, see the exact questions and protocol, and areas of assessment.

Check tips on how to do your Psychology Assignments. 

Mood Disorders and Suicide Discussion

For example, if you look under Outpatient and Primary Care, and click on “Brief Suicide Safety Assessment Worksheet” you will be brought to the assessment tool. This tool goes over the assessment domains of:

  • Frequency of suicidal thoughts
  • Suicide plan
  • Past behavior
  • Symptoms
  • Social supports/stressors
  • How to make a safety plan
  • Determining course of action

Areas of risk assessment refer to what domains of suicide risk you will be probing. If you use the “Brief Suicide Safety Assessment” tool, you would be exploring the above areas of assessment. When assessing for suicide, domains of risk assessment could also include the difference between active/passive suicide ideations, access to means, the formulation of intent (do they have a plan), and time frame (do they have a time frame).

Mood Disorders and Suicide Discussion

For your TD you are asked:

  1. Identify and discuss 3 areas of risk assessment when evaluating a patient for suicidality and how would you assess each of these 3 areas (be specific and try out language).
  • Check out the different areas of assessment above found in the tool. I encourage you to read the proposed script the tool provides and notice how comfortable you feel with the language used, and think about how you might evaluate a client within theses areas.
  1. Which one feels most intimidating to assess, what questions do you have and what skills would you like to hone for suicidal assessment?
  • Imagine what it would be like to use these tools and to ask a client the questions listed in the tool. For example, in the frequency of suicidal thoughts domain, the questions are: In the past few weeks, have you been thinking about killing yourself?” If yes, ask: “How often?” (once or twice a day, several times a day, a couple times a week, etc.) “When was the last time you had these thoughts?)
  • At this time, how do you feel asking these types of questions? I encourage you to read these scripts out loud to gauge your comfort level with the language used, and imagine how it would feel to ask a client who may be expressing suicide ideations or symptoms of depression, such as the example provide in this unit’s TD.
Tags