Asking about suicide and self-harm: moving beyond clinician discomfort.

Abstract

> ‘I’m really sorry, it’s just something we have to ask everyone, but you’ve not had any thoughts of hurting yourself or anything like that, have you?’ I cringed as I read the article by Ford and colleagues1 that had somehow found its way into my Twitter feed, seeing my own half-hearted phrasing reflected back at me. I generally consider myself all right at mental health consultations and often find the need to directly ask these questions quite clunky, preferring to rely on my rapport with the patient, the history of their distress, and an instinctive impression of the seriousness of the presentation. Like a lot of the doctors in the recorded consultations that the research team analysed, I ask them — but I’m not asking them in a way that invites a ‘yes’. We have it drummed into us that asking about self-harm and suicide is one of the key parts of a …