Tag: resilience

Children, Teens and Young Adult Grief
When we look at developmental needs and abilities across the lifespan, we are aware of the need for different approaches to support our children. Our youngest children ages 0 to 2 are often preverbal but still very aware that something is not right when a family experiences a major loss. School-aged children are often concrete thinkers and don’t always have the language to express their emotions fully. Teens are more existential thinkers and turn to their peers more often than not. And young adults, often due to their independence can sometimes fall through the cracks.

For most of us, our losses are exacerbated during the holiday season, when we experience the empty chair around the table. In this episode, Dr. Micki Burns and I discuss five ways we can support kids who are grieving at the holidays:

Plan

Communicate

Reflect

Remember

Cope

About Michaeleen (Micki) Burns, PhD
Micki Burns Headshot.jpg
Micki is the Chief Clinical Officer at Judi’s House and JAG Institute (JH/JAG) and adjunct faculty at the University of Colorado. JH/JAG is a comprehensive family bereavement center in Denver. A Licensed Psychologist with two decades experience providing therapeutic assessment and support to families facing adversity, Micki has witnessed the lasting impact of unaddressed grief. She is dedicated to ensuring appropriate care is available for all and raising childhood bereavement to a level of critical public importance. At JH/JAG she oversees the direct service, research, and training departments working towards a vision where no child is alone in grief. For more information on this episode go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/hope-illuminated-podcast/75

What is self-awareness mindfulness?

“The awareness that emerges through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.” ~Jon Kabat-Zinn

Self-awareness, of our own emotional states is just one of the key tenets in collaborative social and emotional learning being taught in our schools. As a foundation for developing emotional intelligence and resilience, this type of education helps inoculate our youth against the many challenges they face. In this interview, I speak with Dr. Julian Dooley, an international expert on school-based best practices in social and emotional learning including:

Self-Awareness

Self-Management

Responsible Decision-Making

Relationships

Social Awareness

About Dr. Julian Dooley
Julian Dooley headshot B&W.png
Dr. Julian Dooley, psi Training and Education Coordinator, has years of experience in mental health research, treatment and strategy. He has developed mental health programs for psi partner schools across Ohio and also provides psychology services to St. Mary Byzantine School in Cleveland through psi. Additionally, Dr. Dooley has more than 70 invited and peer-reviewed lectures and has been a member of numerous national and international boards and committees, including the Advisory Council of the National Centre Against Bullying and the National Coalition on Children’s Resilience and Mental Health. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Melbourne. For more information on this episode go to https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/hope-illuminated-podcast/74

In this episode, I interview Professor Silvia Sara Canetto, the leading scholar on critical studies of gender, culture and suicidal behaviors from intersectional and global perspectives.

Professor Canetto is most well-known for her research on the gender paradox of suicide, a term she coined, with Isaac Sakinofsky, to refer to the fact that girls and women are more likely to report suicidal thoughts and to engage in suicidal behavior, and yet they are less likely to die of suicide than boys and men.

Professor Canetto is also the author of the theory of cultural scripts of gender and suicidal behavior–a theory that builds on the insights she gained from researching the gender paradox of suicide.

In this interview Professor Canetto discusses what U.S. suicidology was like when she entered the field as an international student at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. She reviews her contributions to the field—from challenging its stigmatizing and gender-biased language (e.g., successful suicide to refer to what in the United States is a more common male-outcome of suicidal behavior) to challenging dominant gender-biased theories of suicidal behaviors (e.g., that women’s suicidal behavior is an emotional and impulsive reaction to trivial relationship problems, and that men’s suicidal behavior is a desperate but deliberate response to serious social and economic adversities).

Professor Canetto then describes her theory and research on suicide scripts. A key point of her theory is that there are different conditions, by culture, when suicidal behavior is relatively permissible and even expected, from certain people, using certain methods, and with specific social consequences. Another important point of her theory is that the different cultural scripts contribute to the cultural variability in suicidality rates. This is because suicidal individuals are influenced by these scripts in choosing their course of action and in giving their suicidal act public meaning. At the end of the interview Professor Canetto reviews examples of research supporting her theory. She also addresses the implications of the theory and evidence on cultural scripts of suicidal behavior–including that there are no universal risk and protective factors, and that therefore prevention should be grounded on local scripts of suicidal behavior.

About Prof. Silvia Sara Canetto
Professor Silvia Sara Canetto
Silvia Sara Canetto, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at Colorado State University, USA. She has graduate degrees from Italy, Israel, and the USA. She speaks, with an accent, every language she knows, English, French, Spanish, Hebrew, and her native Italian. Her scholarship on cultural scripts of suicide has been recognized with the American Association of Suicidology’s (AAS) Shneidman early-career award, and AAS highest-honor, the Dublin award. Her article “The gender paradox in suicide” is the third most-cited in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. She is “Fellow” of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Gerontological Society of America. For more information visit https://www.sallyspencerthomas.com/hope-illuminated-podcast/73

Critical suicidology is an emerging area of scholarship and advocacy that brings together expertise from diverse perspectives to re-examine all that we have believed to be “true” about suicide prevention. Critical suicidologists question the highly medicalized framework of understanding a suicidal person and see suicide in context by understanding how other frameworks — like social justice — expand our imagination on what is possible in prevention, intervention and postvention.

In this conversation with Jess Stohlmann-Rainey, we talk about the ways traditional efforts in suicide prevention have failed us including:

Forced treatment

Fear-based approaches of restraint and isolation

Trying to predict suicide risk

And instead explore alternative, creative and upstream approaches to suicide prevention such as transformative justice work, mutual aid peer support, and accountability in making reparations for histories of harm done to communities.

About Jess Stohlmann-Rainey
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Jess Stohlmann-Rainey (she/her) loves to talk about suicide. She is a mad, queer care worker serving as the Director of Program Development at Rocky Mountain Crisis Partners in so-called Denver [land stolen from the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Núu-agha-t?v?-p?? (Ute), O?héthi Šakówi? (Sioux)]. She has focused her career on creating pathways to intersectional, justice-based, emotional support for marginalized communities. Jess centers her lived expertise as an ex-patient and suicide attempt survivor in her work. Her work can be found in Mad in America, Radical Abolitionist, No Restraints with Rudy Caseres, Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Centers, Postvention in Action: The International Handbook of Suicide Bereavement, Crisis, and The Suicide Prevention Resource Center. She has been featured in USA Today and People Magazine, and her story can be found on Live Through This. She collaborates on an irreverant video podcast situation called Suicide ‘n’ Stuff with Dese’Rae Stage. Jess holds the Lived Experience seat on Colorado’s Suicide Prevention Commission, and was the winner of the 2019 American Association of Suicidology Transforming Lived Experience Award, the 2019 Cookie Gant and Bill Compton LGBTQIA Leadership Award for Excellence in Promoting Diversity and Inclusion Award, and chairs the Paul G Quinnett Lived Experience Writing Competition. She lives with her partner (Jon), housemate (Isaac), and chihuahua (Chunk), and has a taxidermied two headed duckling (Phil & Lil) for an office mate.

Can Employers be Held Accountable for Driving Workers to Suicidal Despair?
Waters, S. (2020). Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France. Liverpool University Press. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/53177/
Waters, S. (2020). Suicide Voices: Labour Trauma in France. Liverpool University Press. https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/53177/

Internationally, over the last few years, there has been increased interest in work-related suicide deaths. No longer are suicides considered the sole result of an individual’s mental health condition. Currently, researchers have linked suicide death and suicidal despair to a toxic working conditions and job strain, including the following psychosocial hazards:

Job Design Challenges

Low job control — lack of decision-making power and limited ability to try new things

Excessive job demands and constant pressure/overtime

Effort-reward imbalance — related to perceived insufficient financial compensation, respect or status

Job insecurity — perceived threat of job loss and anxiety about that threat

Lack of job autonomy

Lack of job variety

Toxic work-design elements (e.g., exposure to environmental aspects that cause pain or illness)

Toxic Interpersonal Relationships

Bullying, harassment and hazing at work

Prejudice and discrimination at work

Lack of supervisor of collegial support — poor working relationships

Family Disruption

Work-family conflict (i.e., work demands make family responsibilities more difficult)

Family-work conflict (i.e., family demands make work role challenging)

Lack of Purpose or Connection to Mission

Heightened job dissatisfaction and the feeling of being “trapped”

Work is not meaningful or rewarding

Other Work-Related Health Impacts

Work-related trauma (e.g., personal or seeing and accident or injury)

Work-related sleep disruption (e.g., due to unexpected overtime, extended or changing shifts)

Work culture of poor self-care and destructive coping (e.g., alcohol and drug use)

In this podcast, I have the honor of interviewing Professor Sarah Waters from the UK. She is a leading global researcher on the topic of work-related suicides, and a driver of legislation to improve working conditions and help make suicide prevention a health and safety priority at work. Here we discuss a number of large employers who have been held accountable for the suicide deaths of their employees in criminal court.

About Professor Sarah Waters

Sarah Waters headshot B&W.png
Sarah Waters is Professor of French Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on work-related suicide in France and across the international stage and seeks to understand the complex connections that link contemporary working conditions with the extreme and subjective act of suicide. Her book, Suicide Voices. Labour Trauma in France was published by Liverpool University Press in September 2020.

In her book, Sarah examines testimonial material linked to 66 suicide cases across three large French corporations. She examines ‘suicide voices’ considering how workers themselves describe the circumstances that led them to such desperate extremes in the letters, emails and recordings they leave behind. Why at the present historical juncture do conditions of work push some individuals to take their own lives? What can suicide letters tell us about the contemporary economic order and its impact on flesh and blood bodies? How do suicidal individuals describe the causes and motivations of their act?

Alongside her research, Sarah actively campaigns to improve workplace legislation in order to recognise and monitor work-related suicides. She is part of the trade union Hazards campaign in the UK that lobbies the Health and Safety Executive

She lives in Leeds and is a mother of two teenage boys.