Tony White’s Weblog

Workshop by

 Tony White

The 15 – 24 years age group is one of the highest risk groups in terms of completed suicides and suicide attempts. Also teenage girls in particular are prone to self harming such as by cutting self.

Obviously there are special features of these age groups that make them particularly susceptible to such actions compared to the general adult population. These will be described and discussed in the workshop.

There are many different reasons why a teenager would want to harm self or take their own life. These will be described and ideas on how you deal with the different causes will be highlighted.

The link between harming self and harming others is also considered. Why do kids kill?. Psychologically there are some close similarities between killing self and killing others. A young adult called Martin Bryant killed 35 people at Port Arthur in Australia and then attempted to take his own life. Teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold shot dead 30 students a Collumbine high school in the USA and then killed themselves. Why these events happened provide valuable insight into dealing with teenage suicide.

Harming self and harming others (bullying) are also closely linked. Psychologically they are quite similar. Looking at why teenagers harm others provides insight into why they harm them self and thus strategies for dealing with self harming can be devised.

Date: Tuesday May 27th, 2008. 7.00pm (1 to 2 hours)

Venue: 136 Loftus Street, North Perth

Cost $45.00

Contact: Tony White 

Email  agbw@bigpond.com   

Phone  9328 8993

Website: www.ynot1.com.au

Tony White

Relational TA Therapy Group

Study group

The next group night will be:

Tuesday April 15th, 2008

7.00 – 9.00pm

136 Loftus Street, North Perth.

Cost $45

Firstly there is supervision provided for anyone who wants to discuss a particular client or counselling issue

Relational therapy group

Article on group process and group dynamics on March group

http://graffiti99.blogspirit.com/archive/2008/03/17/relational-group-therapy-part-2.html

If you wish to attend please contact me -

email: agbw@bigpond.com

Ph: 9328 8993

Assessing suicide risk

Tony worked in a prison where his main task was the assessment and management of suicidal people. There are many systems by which one can assess how much of a risk a particular individual is of suicide or self harm. Most systems that set about assessing suicide risk do it in a  mathematical fashion. They highlight certain factors that are statistically related to suicide. 

For instance, 

* in Australia the highest daily average for suicide is Monday, followed by 

Tuesday and the lowest is Saturday 

* people who have a history of depression are more likely to suicide 

* there are higher suicide rates in Australian cities than in rural areas 

* people who have poor coping skills 

* those who are not thinking in a future oriented way

* people who have little social and family support 

* people who have a history of substance abuse have a higher suicide rate 

In these assessment systems one then sets about adding up the number of “boxes 

ticked” for the person. The assumption is the more ticks for the person the more 

likely the person is a suicide risk. Whilst this is a productive thing to do it fails to look at the individual psychology of the person at the time which also happens to be one of the most important factors in such an assessment.

In this workshop two ways to do that will be shown. And then how to combine that information with the usually gathered information to assess for the level of suicide risk.

Date: Tuesday March 18th, 2008. 7.00pm (1 to 2 hours)

Venue: 136 Loftus Street, North Perth

Contact: Tony White – email  agbw@bigpond.com   

or phone  9328 8993