ABSTRACT
TRUTH OR FICTION?
When a member of a family or couple reports thoughts about harm to self or others, one of the major tasks for the therapist is to determine if the individual's condition is a behavioral emergency as opposed to a behavioral crisis.
If clinicians have been well trained, they can be expected to predict suicide or violence to others.
Proximal risk factors can act as precipitants for life-threatening behavior, but are seldom sufficient to explain it.
If a perfect predictive test for behavioral emergencies were invented, it could easily be validated by using suicide or homicide as an outcome measure.
Many instances of suicide or violence can be explained by the acute risk factors involved.
Poor parent-child communication has been associated with adolescent suicidal behavior.
If a patient or client is depressed but also feels anxious, he or she will be too apprehensive to actually commit suicide.
Having children under eighteen in the home is considered protective against suicide for depressed patients.
Male perpetrators of violence against their partners are, generally speaking, no more aggressive outside of their domestic relationship than anyone else.
Having been victimized in an adult relationship seems related to becoming involved in future violent relationships.
With domestically violent men, alcohol abuse makes little difference in the likelihood that they will become violent again.
Women who are separated from abusive husbands are three times more likely to be vicitimized than women who are divorced.
Given that adolescents are attempting to become independent of their families, family is not recommended for suicidal adolescents.
Verbal threats of violence in a relationship can usually be regarded as ventilating or “blowing off steam” and are not significantly correlated with risk of physical violence.
Although one might think that pregnant women could elicit protective feelings from their partners, women in violent relationships who became pregnant are actually at heightened risk of becoming victims of domestic violence.
