The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide: Guidance for Working with Suicidal Clients - Tapa dura

Why do people die by suicide? Dr. Thomas Joiner and his colleagues attempt to answer this age-old question by exploring two obvious yet insightful assumptions: people die by suicide because they can - that is, they become desensitized to pain and habituated toward violence; people die by suicide because they want to - they typically have no sense of belonging to a valued group or relationship, and they feel that they have become a burden to loved ones.This book offers a new theoretical framework for diagnosis and risk-assessment of a patient's entry into the dark and obscure mental world of suicidality, and for the creation of preventive and public-health campaigns aimed at the disorder. More important, though, the book provides new, effective clinical guidelines for crisis intervention and for therapeutic alliances in psychotherapy and suicide prevention.

M. David Rudd is Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at Texas Tech University, with an adjunct appointment as Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the Texas Tech Health Sciences Center. He also maintains a part-time private practice in clinical psychology. He completed his doctoral training at the University of Texas-Austin and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in cognitive therapy at the Beck Institute under the direction of Aaron T. Beck.

Rudd is a Diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology and a Fellow of three professional societies, including the American Psychological Association (Division 12 and Division 29), the International Association of Suicide Research, and the Academy of Cognitive Therapy (a founding fellow). He was recently elected a Distinguished Practitioner and Scholar of the National Academies of Practice in Psychology.

He was awarded the first-ever American Association of Suicidology Exceptional Leadership Award in 2005. In 2007, he received the Karl F. Heiser Presidential Award for Advocacy at the 2007 American Psychological Association Convention in San Francisco.