Reference no: EM132108061

In a pervious section of HSV 101, a student brought up suicide in the context of this model and I wanted to also share my thoughts on this important topic with you. Suicide is a very real scenario that the majority of human services professionals will encounter at some point in their career. This was a common worry of mine because in my former career, I was the person in the office who specialized in psychological disabilities, so many of my clients had a psychological disorder. One of our dilemmas in my office was how to handle clients who often talked about suicide, but then would say they weren't serious when I would call medical professionals, like their psychiatrist, to determine their risk. Let me first make it clear that if you ever think someone is at imminent risk of suicide, don't leave them alone and call 911 so that they can be evaluated. In my office, many of my client were also teenagers/young adults, so they were more prone to use attention seeking threats and I had to sort out who was at serious risk vs. who was just being dramatic. Using the ethical decision making model, if a client talks about suicide, but then says they weren't serious, what is the responsibility of the case worker? In my office, we had so many of these "false alarms" with students that would take up significant time and great emotional stress to let a client go and not know if you've made the right call or to call 911, have a client incur a bill for the ambulance transport and not know if they really needed that level of intervention. We partnered with the counseling center on campus and made the decisions to implement a policy that if a client tells us they are suicidal, and then says they weren't serious, we first try to call their psychiatrist when applicable, and if they can't be reached, we call 911. We communicated this new policy to clients to let them know that suicidal ideation is taken seriously every time, so if they make the threat, the outcome will be professional assessment at the hospital. The concern was that a client would be reluctant to share with us knowing that we would call 911. There are many unclear situations such as this that occur in human services. What are your thoughts?