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AAMFT
Institutes for Advanced Clinical
Training
March
3 - 7, 2010
Panama
City Beach, FL
Hope in
Action: Practical Strategies for Working Effectively with
Suicide
Heather Fiske, Ph.D.
 Although statistics vary from year to
year, in the past decade suicide has been listed at times as
one of the leading causes of death in the United States. With
depression, one of the risk factors for suicide, on the rise,
this topic is more crucial to therapists than ever before.
The idea of hope is so important in helping those at risk for
as well as those who have been touched by this tragedy. In
this Institute, participants will focus on effective,
respectful, client-centered therapeutic work with individuals
and families struggling with suicide. Practical strategies to
elicit hope and reasons for living will be a core aspect.
Solution-focused conversational tools are invaluable in
connecting with clients who are in despair and helping them to
discover both realistic possibilities for change, and the
necessary resources within themselves to make such changes.
While the clear principles and the
empirical evidence for the approach will be presented, the
training will be practice-based. Strategies useful in crisis
work and in ongoing treatment will be demonstrated through
stories, case vignettes, and videotaped and/or re-enacted
excerpts from conversations with clients. Brief focused
exercises and guided discussions will give participants the
opportunity to experience, observe, and evaluate specific
methods; to practice clinical decision making with clients at
risk for suicide; and to consider the balance between
problem-focus and hope-focus in their own work.
The Institute will cover:
- a set of practice principles for
working with individuals and families where there is risk
for suicide, based on the available empirical evidence in
the context of client wisdom and clinical utility.
- practical strategies to elicit,
utilize and reinforce hope and reasons for living.
- balancing risk and protective factors
in collaborative safety planning.
- effective practice with specific
intervention challenges, including crisis situations and
high-risk circumstances such as work with substance-abusing
young men and with people who make repeated suicide attempts
(aka “chronic attempts at solution”).
- working with and learning from
survivors of suicide (i.e. people bereaved by suicide),
including clinician survivors.
Course Schedule
Thursday, March 4-Sunday March 7, 2010
8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. each day
This course provides 20 hours of continuing education.
Heather Fiske, Ph.D. is a
psychologist with over 35 years of clinical experience in
hospitals, community clinics, schools, and correctional
facilities. Originally from Nova Scotia, she is currently in
private practice in Toronto, Canada. Her teaching activities
range from a postgraduate program in brief therapy at the
University of Toronto to training service providers who work
with the homeless to numerous presentations for suicide
prevention advocacy groups in local, national and
international settings. Heather has served on the Board of
Directors of the Canadian Association of Suicide Prevention (CASP)
and is the recipient of the CASP national service award. She
is one of the founders of the Solution-Focused Brief Therapy
Association, and her book, Hope in Action: Solution-Focused
Conversations about Suicide, was published in 2008.
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