The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide: Guidance for Working With Suicidal Clients

About this book

Why do people die by suicide? Thomas E. Joiner and his colleagues attempt to answer this age-old question by exploring two obvious yet insightful assumptions: -People die by suicide because they can--that is they become desensitized to pain and habituated toward violence. -People die by suicide because they want to--they typically have no sense of belonging to a valued group or relationship and they feel that they have become a burden to loved ones. This book offers a new theoretical framework for diagnosis and risk-assessment of a patients entry into the dark and obscure mental world of suicidality and for the creation of preventive and public-health campaigns aimed at the disorder. More important though the book provides new effective clinical guidelines for crisis intervention and for therapeutic alliances in psychotherapy and suicide prevention.