Suicide & Self-Injury Prevention Workbook

The Suicide & Self-Injury Prevention Workbook for adult clients is a proactive means for dealing with the many characteristics that may prompt people to experience self-injury and/or suicide ideation.

This workbook consists of reproducible materials for use by mental health professionals and health care providers in their work with adult individuals and/or with very small groups.


Chapter Descriptions:

Each chapter begins with a table of contents and treatment planning options for clinicians of individuals and small groups to engage in prior to distributing the actual activity.

Self-Injury This chapter will help clinicians to assist clients identify and explore their self-injury actions as well as discover and implement some tools, skills, and techniques for overcoming this behavior.

Warning Signs This chapter will assist clinicians to help clients recognize, identify, and explore the warning signs and the effects that these signs have on their self-injury or suicidal thoughts.

Risk Factors This chapter will assist clinicians to help clients explore their various risk factors and ways they can reduce the effects of these risk factors when experiencing a crisis.

Prevention This chapter will assist clinicians to provide clients with tools, skills, and techniques for receiving help and reducing their self-harming and suicidal ideation.

Support This chapter will assist clinicians to provide clients with ways to access a variety of needed support people as well as community resources.

Client and Clinician National Resources This chapter will provide clients and clinicians information about self-injury and suicide prevention from national resources.


Activity handouts ask participants for opinions and facts about their feelings and beliefs. The accuracy and usefulness of the information is dependent on the information that clients honestly provide about themselves. Assure clients that they do not need to share their information if they do not want to do so, nor do they need to show the handout to anyone but the clinician. Assure them that they are in a safe place and they can be honest.

It is usually difficult for troubled people to express their feelings or their thoughts. The purpose of these activity handouts is for participants to build confidence to open up by completing interesting and appealing pages, and writing words that are challenging to think about or say.

Activity Handouts...

• Help clinicians quickly and easily learn details about each client s life to enhance the treatment process.

• Help clinicians in the exploration of progress made by clients as they continue to develop skills and integrate them into their daily lives.

• Help clients learn more about how their thinking, management of feelings, and behaviors are affecting their thoughts of self-injury and suicide.

• Provide clinicians with a process for initiating discussions about sensitive topics like self- injury and suicide ideation.

• Provide clients with ways to tell their stories as they work collaboratively with clinicians.

• Serve as a great aid in developing plans for effective change and positive outlook in life, both in the present and in the future.

• Allow clients to explore various elements of themselves and their situations.

• Serve as exploratory exercises and not a judgment of who they are as human beings.