For decades, suicide prevention training has been shaped more by fear, liability management, and professional self-protection than by healing and human connection.

Clinicians are often taught to respond reflexively: assess risk, document carefully, secure a safety contract, force hospitalization, and medication. And while these steps may reduce professional anxiety, research increasingly shows that many traditional practices lack strong evidence of effectiveness and may unintentionally alienate, shame, or intensify despair.

If we are serious about preventing suicide — not just managing risk — we must make a fundamental mindset shift.

In this session, Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas — award-winning speaker and suicide prevention expert — will help you examine the internal narratives, fears, and biases that shape traditional suicide prevention strategies so that you can reframe suicide care from self-protection to dignified support. You'll get:

• Relational skills to shift from containment to connection when meeting with a client expressing suicidality
• Collaborative strategies for risk formulation that communicate respect for self-determination
• Powerful tools to center lived experience as a catalyst for empathy, cultural responsiveness, and stigma reduction

Much clinical training is necessarily focused on risk assessment and safety planning — but what do you do after the crisis is over with a client who has suicidal thoughts?

How do you go beyond safety to focus on helping a suicidal client want to stay alive?

In this session, Dr. Stacey Freedenthal — esteemed suicidologist and author of Helping the Suicidal Person and Loving Someone with Suicidal Thoughts — will give you the tools you need to work effectively with clients with chronic suicidality. You'll learn:

• Specific questions to ask that will help clients evaluate their reasons for living
• Interventions that go beyond survival to help find meaning and hope
• Evidence-based tools to help clients respond differently to their suicidal thoughts

When a client is in an acute crisis, a survival-focused approach can save lives. But an overreliance on survival-focused strategies with clients who struggle with chronic suicidality can unintentionally keep treatment reactive… rather than preventing future episodes of increased risk that can wear away at clients' resilience.

In this session, Dr. Craig Bryan — renowned developer of the Crisis Response Planning intervention — will teach you how to help your clients recognize early warning signs and take action before suicidal thoughts escalate. You'll learn:

• A clear framework for intervention with clients who have cycled in and out of suicidal crises
• How and when to best utilize coping strategies to improve clinical outcomes
• Strategies to help clients who feel out of control regain a sense of empowerment

When you're fearful of malpractice liability, you're likely to offer interventions to suicidal clients that are an empathic miss and that may even make matters worse.

It's time to shift to a client-centered, suicide-focused approach to clinical suicide prevention — care that centers empathy, collaboration, and honesty.

In this session, Dr. David Jobes — developer of the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) treatment method — will help you transition away from an anxiety-based, clinician-centered practice to a framework that reliably decreases suicide ideation and attempts. You'll learn:

• An evidence-based approach to assess, target, and treat suicidal risk
• How to avoid overreliance on hospitalizations that may lead to more harm than good
• Interventions to help clients cultivate purpose and meaning

It's hard to feel prepared for the ethical dilemmas that show up in suicide prevention practice — like how to manage confidentiality when it seems like now is the time to involve family and friends in supporting your client's safety… whether involuntary hospitalization is truly the least-restrictive care environment… or how to provide clients with what is evidence-based while institutional demands require a different course of action.

In this session, Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas will walk you through the evolving ethical landscape of suicide-informed care to give you what you need to know when you're working with clients, whether they're in crisis, live with chronic suicidal thoughts, or survived a suicide attempt. You'll get:

• An ethical compass to balance autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice
• Tools drawn from contemporary ethics frameworks, cultural humility practices, and lived experience perspectives
• A framework to balance professional duty of care with compassion and respect

When your client lost a loved one to suicide, it can be hard to know where to begin. And without suicide-specific postvention training, therapists may unintentionally over-pathologize normal responses, miss critical themes, or prematurely push for meaning-making.

Traditional grief work isn't enough for the layered psychological, relational, and existential impact that suicide loss survivors face — leaving them at elevated risk for depression, PTSD, prolonged grief, and their own suicidal ideation.

In this clinically grounded and emotionally resonant session, Dr. Marlon Rollins integrates current research, professional expertise, and lived experience to provide structured, trauma-informed tools for suicide-specific bereavement care. You'll learn:

• Strategies to strengthen the therapeutic alliance with suicide loss survivors
• Evidence-based, culturally responsive tools to address survivor guilt and stigma
• Practical techniques to differentiate traumatic and complicated grief

Typical grief interventions don't fit for suicide loss. They don't account for traumatic reactions of survivors — the disorienting intrusive thoughts, the overwhelming guilt, and the unnerving moral injury.

And when therapists skip over stabilization and try to get right into deeper therapeutic work, they may inadvertently increase distress, reinforce shame narratives, and pathologize normative trauma reactions.

In this session, Sarah W. Gaer — nationally recognized suicide prevention specialist and trainer — will walk you through a sequencing-based response to suicide exposure that integrates trauma science, field experience, and applied frameworks. You'll learn:

• The common clinical missteps to avoid in your work with suicide loss survivors
• How to use Psychological First Aid principles to provide emotional support and bolster coping
• Interventions to transform moral injury and survivor's guilt into opportunities for meaning making

Many suicidal individuals will never show up to therapy or call a hotline. That's why your community needs your expertise outside of your office — because suicide prevention should be a networked effort that extends beyond clinical walls.

In this session, Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas will show you how you can partner with organizations to assist peer support systems that reach suicidal individuals where they are actually showing up — at work and in their communities. You'll get:

• Insight into how peer allies are an essential pathway back to meaning, connection, and a passion for living
• Strategies for reaching populations that need your help but may never seek care
• Tools to become a strategic partner and consultant to organizations seeking to utilize peer support networks

Join ethics and legal expert Dr. Kathryn Krase, JD, MSW, as she takes you inside the essential skills for creating clear, ethical, and defensible clinical documentation. Drawing on her expertise as a licensed social worker and practicing attorney, Dr. Krase blends real-world examples with practical strategies for an engaging and confidence-building workshop that will transform the way you approach recordkeeping.

Discover:

• How to write effective progress notes that protect your clients and your practice
• Best practices for managing client record requests and digital communication
• Documentation strategies for teletherapy, termination, and evolving privacy laws

Includes 3.25 hours of self-study CE credit