Working with youth at risk of suicide

The values, insights, understandings, and experiences of Youth and Family Counsellors who work with suicidal youth and their families are important but relatively unexplored sources of professional knowledge. SCYC Director Jennifer White and Island Health collaborators, Reg Fleming and Wendy Young, will delve into this knowledge through a recently awarded, Island Health Collaborative Research Grant: “A Practice-Based Study of Youth and Family Counsellors’ Experiences Working with Suicidal Youth.” White notes, “By drawing on the specific strengths of qualitative inquiry to better understand how Youth and Family Counsellors navigate the challenges of working therapeutically with youth at risk for suicide to support their clients’ re-engagement with life, we are making an important contribution to a growing body of research and practice scholarship known as “practice-based evidence”.