Konrad Michel, a leading psychiatrist and acclaimed expert, draws on decades of experience to offer necessary new ways of understanding—and preventing—suicide. After one of his first patients died by suicide, Michel devoted himself to researching self-harm. Writing vividly and personally, he recounts more than forty years of working with and learning from suicidal patients.

Michel shows that suicide is not just a consequence of mental illness but an action related to a person’s life story. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with suicidal patients, he argues that suicide and suicide attempts occur when someone experiences extreme emotional pain that severely impairs the ability to think and act rationally. Based on this understanding, Michel and his colleagues developed a person-centered approach to treatment that overcomes the limitations of the traditional medical model. Through a brief therapy, patients find a personally meaningful narrative understanding of their suicidal thoughts and impulses. People at risk can learn to recognize their vulnerabilities in order to manage potentially life-threatening situations and keep themselves safe. Michel emphasizes the importance of communication: medical professionals need to connect with patients as individuals to identify specific warning signs.

Both compassionate and rigorous, this book provides vital insight into suicide prevention and shows how changing attitudes will help save lives. It includes practical advice for people at risk, with special emphasis on young people, as well as for relatives and health professionals.

Konrad Michel, a leading psychiatrist and acclaimed expert, draws on decades of experience to offer necessary new ways of understanding—and preventing—suicide.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Losing a Patient to Suicide and What It Means for a Young Doctor
2. First Lessons in Reducing Suicide
3. Emotional Stress Affects Brain Function
4. The Brain and Suicide
5. Problems of Communication in Medical Consultation
Box: Theories to Explain Suicide
6. Suicide Is Not an Illness
7. The Fragile Sense of Who We Are
8. Personal Vulnerabilities and Suicide
9. A Think Tank of Concerned Therapists
10. Translating Acquired Knowledge Into a New Therapy
11. Now What Does This All Mean for Suicide Prevention?
12. A Special Concern: Young People
13. For Health Professionals: It’s About the Person in the Patient
Appendix 1. Suicide Is Not a Rational Action: ASSIP Handout for Patients
Appendix 2. Questionnaire: Learning Objectives
Appendix 3. What to Do If You Are Concerned About Someone
Appendix 4. Resources
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Offers much research-based, sound advice for clinicians on how to engage patients more effectively, making therapy more helpful in stemming the suicide tide.

Compelling, compassionate, and comprehensive. Not only is Konrad Michel’s book a must read for clinicians and researchers but it is written so accessibly that anyone affected by suicide will benefit from The Suicidal Person. Michel takes the reader on a journey of his career, what he has learned, the development of his innovative treatment but also his experiences of loss, including the devastating loss of his son to suicide. An incredible synthesis of forty years of research and practice.

The Suicidal Person is a remarkable hybrid of autobiographical, scientific, clinical, and theoretical gems based on Dr. Michel's decades of experience. It will deepen your understanding of how people can become suicidal—and how you can help. Suicidologists, clinicians, psychotherapy students, loved ones, and people who themselves have suicidal thoughts will all benefit from learning about Dr. Michel’s journey and his compassionate, client-centered treatment for people in danger of suicide.

Dr. Michel offers a rare blend of clinical wisdom, poignant personal experience, empirical evidence, and essential practicality in a compelling volume that will prove invaluable to clinicians assessing and treating those struggling with suicidality. This book represents the distillation of three-plus decades of clinical work and applied research into an easy to understand and deliver model for the care of those questioning the value of life. Most importantly, it’s an approach that recognizes the enduring vulnerability of being human, our unavoidable connections to one another, and that compassion is the necessary foundation to reducing the tragedy of suicide. Michel’s practical and empirically informed approach is applicable across all clinical contexts and should be a must-read for anyone working with suicidal individuals.

The Suicidal Person chronicles Konrad Michel's lifelong quest to find a new way of helping self-destructive patients. Trained as both empirical scientist and empathic psychotherapist, Dr. Michel has over a five-decade career sought out the most brilliant thinkers in contemporary suicidology and joined with them to reconceptualize the suicidal mind. He integrates both biological and psychological perspectives in a deceptively simple treatment method that emphasizes the therapist's intensely respectful curiosity about the suicidal patient's experience and their collaboration as equals in developing a shared understanding of that experience. Dr. Michel's humble yet powerful approach offers patients liberation from the life-threatening vortex of suicidality.

In his extraordinary book, The Suicidal Person, Dr. Konrad Michel has written a unique volume that fully displays his decades of clinical acumen, innovation in clinical research, leadership in the field, as well as his humanity and wisdom. Dr. Michel has an uncanny ability to integrate noteworthy clinical insights and scientific truths, while writing with a common touch that makes this book both readable and relatable. This text is relevant to a remarkably wide audience from clinical professionals, to researchers, to people who struggle with suicide, and to those who are touched by suicide either directly or indirectly. This book is a treasure—a gift actually—to anyone who cares about the human condition, the perils of suffering, the promise of recovery and life.