Psychotherapist suicidality: breaking the silence using interactive interviewing

This interactive autoethnographic research project explores psychotherapist suicidality as a human reality that has been given little attention in psychotherapy and counselling psychology affiliations. It addresses the importance of acknowledging, understanding and supporting psychotherapists who are, or have been, suicidal, and of growing knowledge structures that benefit future support systems. I draw on my own experience of becoming suicidal while training to be a psychotherapist and counselling psychologist at the Metanoia Institute in London - an establishment jointly founded in 1984 by Sue Fish, Brian Dobson and Petruska Clarkson – a Counselling Psychologist who took her own life on 21st May 2006. The study was inspired by my dissatisfaction with what I experienced as an air of silence in the training institution around Dr Clarkson’s suicide, a paucity of formal research around psychotherapist suicidality, and a lack of open reflexive dialogue on the subject amongst psychotherapists and counselling psychologists in training and beyond.

To achieve an authentic dialogic exploration of psychotherapist suicidality, I drew on Ellis’s (1997) autoethnographic interactive interviewing method to interview three qualified psychotherapists with histories of suicidality. In each interview both parties were able to ask questions of the other’s experience of being suicidal when in training or post qualification in psychotherapy. This helped achieve parity in the verbal exchanges, engendering deeper conversations and avoiding othering (e.g., Goodwin 2017).

An examination of the interview exchanges was guided by two research questions. The first, How are the accounts of suicidality co-created by psychotherapists with histories of suicidality?’ revealed a reluctance amongst psychotherapists to talk about their own suicidality, which included silencing dynamics within traditional qualitative research processes. The second question, ’What do psychotherapists say when they talk about their own suicidality?’ yielded four main themes: psychotherapist suicidality as a distinctive phenomenon; context, training, and organisational implications; holding and regulating psychotherapist suicidality; under-researched area of psychotherapist suicidality.

The study found that psychotherapists who have been suicidal experience a clash within the ‘space of possibilities’ (Heidegger, 1953) offered by the socially constructed identity, psychotherapist. Constraining forces emerge in training, often implicitly cultivated by organisational cultural expectations around anticipated identities, beliefs and behaviours, that silence rather than amplify, and disempower rather than empower, the capacity for suicidal psychotherapists to speak out without fear, contribute knowledge, and seek support when experiencing suicidality.