ABSTRACT
Therapeutic assessment (TA) is a brief therapeutic intervention that forms an organic part of the psychosocial assessment following an act of self-harm. It is aimed at achieving the following goals:
These factors relate to what emerged from the qualitative research, discussed in Chapter 8, that looked into the hopes and expectations held by adolescents in relation to the self-harm assessment. Before being assessed, the young people were asked a number of questions, including: ‘How would you know that this assessment had been useful?’ Interestingly, most assessors agreed that these objectives are indeed important and this is how a method of rating TA was introduced. A practical extension of these goals is to engage the young person in follow-up after an episode of self-harm.
