Practising Hope With a Client Who Speaks Suicide

Abstract

Suicide issues have been a consistent concern in Malaysia and everyone within the society has a moral obligation to intervene to prevent suicide. Counsellors are one of the many professional groups charged with this responsibility. The practice of counselling clients in the context of suicidal ideation is a complex and challenging therapeutic process with professional, personal, social, legal, medical, and ethical issues, and with shades of uncertainties inherent to the suicidal threat shaping the counsellor-client relationship. This is a time when it is clear that responsibilities for and influences on practice go beyond the client in the room where counsellors negotiate roles and responsibilities, make difficult clinical judgements and ethical decisions, and take responsible actions. Decisions are not simple and straightforward, and care must be delicately considered for each individual in his or her specific context. In this paper, I present an experience-near account of how professional practice could be shaped by the value of a counsellor’s personal lived experience. A qualitative with discursive approach was employed to examine a counsellor’s personal lived experience and how she practised hope by taking small steps to support a client presented with suicidal ideation. I show how feminists value positions a counsellor’s personal experiential knowledge in her practice to work alongside her preferred theoretical model which she was taught. I argue that the feminist principle of personal-political-professional offers a framework to recognise the shaping effect of counsellors’ lived experience in their response to clients with suicidal ideation. My witnessing of counsellor’s act of practice provokes me to re-examine my views of professional practice and the relationship between theory and practice. From the perspective of practice epistemology, I question how do one accounts for the kinds of knowledge one acquire from past experiences in life, within the landscape of professional practice?