Making Sense of Suicide: Risk Assessment: Easing Client Fears

by DrKatieBrazaitis | Oct 8, 2024 | Clinical Interventions, Enhancing Competency, Pop Culture, Media, and the Arts

In my last post, I talked about common fears clinicians face when conducting a suicide risk assessment. This week, I’m going to talk about our client’s fears and how we can help ease them. Please note, aspects of this post are somewhat oversimplified. This...

Making Sense of Suicide: Risk Assessment: Facing Your Fears

by DrKatieBrazaitis | Sep 22, 2024 | Clinical Interventions, Enhancing Competency, Suicide

Welcome back to my series Making Sense of Suicide. I’ve previously talked about why we need to talk about making sense of suicide more, and I reviewed key theories to provide the needed framework for understanding suicidal ideations and related behaviors. Now...

Validation: Part 1: What and Why

by DrKatieBrazaitis | Sep 10, 2024 | Clinical Interventions, Enhancing Competency

If you’re a follower of my blog, you’ve probably noticed I’m a big fan of validation. I talked about it a lot in my post on Inside Out and in my Making Sense of Suicide series. Even when I’m not labeling the role of validation explicitly,...

Trauma-Informed Care

by DrKatieBrazaitis | Aug 12, 2024 | Clinical Interventions, Enhancing Competency

This Friday, August 16, 2024 at 12 MST I’ll be providing an Arizona Perinatal Psychiatry Access Line (APAL) Grand Rounds on Trauma-Informed Care in a Gynecological Setting. In the talk, I introduce the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services...

Making Sense of Suicide: Part 2 Theory Continued

by DrKatieBrazaitis | Jul 30, 2024 | Clinical Interventions, Enhancing Competency

In Making Sense of Suicide: Part 2 Theory, I introduced Joiner’s Interpersonal Theory of Suicide and Jobes’ Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicide. In this blog, I’ll round out my discussion on theory by reviewing Marsha Linehan’s Dialectical Behavior...

Distress Tolerance: Holding Ice

by DrKatieBrazaitis | Jul 15, 2024 | Clinical Interventions, Enhancing Competency

Holding Ice is one of my go-to distress tolerance skills.  It is a modification of the DBT TIP skills, which aim to change your emotional state through changing your body’s physiology.  This blog is for clinicians and those seeking healing alike.  You’ll notice some...