Supporting a client who is at risk of taking their own life can be very challenging as a counsellor. In this section, Rory and Ken discuss some ways of recognising if your client is high risk, and the steps you can take to prepare for this:

• It’s time to make a shift away from prediction-based risk assessment and towards an emphasis on therapeutic engagement.
• We should be aiming to engage with these clients who may be thinking of taking their own life and working on it within the therapeutic relationship.
• This is a subject that requires continuous CPD.
• Risk assessments can be very useful – but they’re not foolproof.
• To recognise suicide risk in your therapy clients, you need to be thinking about the dynamic nature of a client and how this might present.
• Detecting suicidality requires holistic evaluation, detailed enquiry, and checking context.
• This is a subject with a lot of personalisation – it could present itself differently in different clients.
• Neurodivergent clients could be at a higher risk.
• Do you need to break confidentiality? Can you take a collaborative approach with an involvement of support systems around the individual?
• To help yourself recognise suicide risk in your therapy clients, make sure you’re doing the training around this subject.