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Alternatives to Suicide

Beyond Risk and Toward a Life Worth Living

  • 1st Edition - January 26, 2020
  • Latest edition
  • Editors: Andrew Page, Werner Stritzke
  • Language: English

Alternatives to Suicide: Beyond Risk and Toward a Life Worth Living demonstrates how fostering resilience and a desire for life can broaden and advance an understanding of suicid… Read more

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Description

Alternatives to Suicide: Beyond Risk and Toward a Life Worth Living demonstrates how fostering resilience and a desire for life can broaden and advance an understanding of suicide. The book summarizes the existing literature and outlines a new focus on the dynamic interplay of risk and resilience that leads to a life-focus approach to suicide prevention. It calls for a treatment approach that enhances the opportunity to collaboratively engage clients in discussion about their lives. Providing a new perspective on how to approach suicide prevention, the book also lays out key theories on resilience and the interplay of risk and protective factors.

Finally, the book outlines how emerging technologies and advances in data-analytic sophistication using real-time monitoring of suicide dynamics are ushering the field of suicide research and prevention into a new and exciting era.

Key features

  • Focuses on what attenuates the transition from thinking about suicide to attempting it
  • Calls for a life-focus treatment approach as opposed to risk-aversion intervention techniques
  • Demonstrates how fostering resilience can advance our understanding of pathways to suicide
  • Discusses emerging technologies being used in current suicide research and prevention
  • Outlines the differences between risk factors and risk correlates
  • Covers real-time assessment of dynamic suicide risk

Readership

Researchers and clinicians from mental health disciplines (psychology, psychiatry, social work, nursing); students in mental health disciplines

Table of contents

Part 1 Time for a paradigm shift

1. Suicide is about life

2. The implicit suicidal mind clings to life

3. Zest for life: an antidote to suicide?

Part 2 To be or not to be

4. The temporal dynamics of the wish to live and the wish to die among suicidal individuals

5. Daily monitoring of the wish to live and the wish to die with suicidal inpatients

6. Alternatives to suicide: a nonlinear dynamic perspective

7. Connectedness and suicide

Part 3 Through the lens of the suicidal person

8. Collaborative movement from “preventing suicide” to recovering desire to live

9. The “alternatives to suicide” approach: a decade of lessons learned

10. Psychological resilience to suicidal experiences

11. Textual analysis of suicide notes: how a new approach could yield fresh insights?

Part 4 Suicide and a life worth living from indigenous and refugee perspectives

12. Self-determination and strengths-based Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander suicide prevention: an emerging evidence-based approach

13. Refugees and suicide: when the quest for a better life becomes thwarted

Part 5 Epigenetics of suicidal behaviors

14. Epigenetics of suicidal behaviors

Review quotes

"This book explores fresh perspectives on suicide, rather than being another book about prevention. The authors present very insightful tools and resources."—Doody

Product details

  • Edition: 1
  • Latest edition
  • Published: January 27, 2020
  • Language: English

About the editors

AP

Andrew Page

Professor, Associate Dean (Research), School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia and on the steering committee of the Young Lives Matter Foundation. Dr. Page has worked as a clinical psychologist in the Clinical Unit for Anxiety and Depression and was co-director of the Robin Winkler Clinic where he was instrumental in developing the clinic’s individual and group treatment programs as a model of science-informed practice. He is a past National President of the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behavior Therapy and the inaugural winner of the Tracy Goodall Early Career Award in recognition of innovation in research. He is currently Associate Editor with Psychotherapy Research and has published over 100 research papers, books, and book chapters. His books include “Clinical Psychology for Trainees”, and he has been awarded teaching fellowships for his work in the training of clinical psychologists and developing training opportunities in rural and remote settings.
Affiliations and expertise
Professor, Associate Dean (Graduate Research Studies), School of Psychological Science, University of Western Australia

WS

Werner Stritzke

Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia. Author of three books and over 40 papers and book chapters, Dr. Stritzke has also presented at dozens of conferences including the 10th European Congress of Psychology and the Australian Psychological Society. His research interests cover a wide array of topics such as suicidology, self-stigma in mental illness, and substance abuse.
Affiliations and expertise
Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia

View book on ScienceDirect

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