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When Your Client Dies By Suicide: An interview with Dr. Nina Gutin

Curt and Katie chat with Nina J. Gutin, Ph.D. about to discuss the emotional, professional, and systemic impact of client suicide on clinicians. We break down the common reactions of guilt and blame, highlight the importance of postvention support, and explore strategies to navigate grief and maintain clinical confidence.

Transcript

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(Show notes provided in collaboration with Otter.ai and ChatGPT.)

An Interview with Nina J. Gutin, Ph.D.

Photo ID: Nina GutinNina J. Gutin, Ph.D. is a Clinical Psychologist in Pasadena, California. She conducts trainings in Suicide Prevention and Postvention, facilitates “Survivors After Suicide” groups for the Didi Hirsch Suicide Prevention Center, and is a member of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Network. She is co-chair of the Coalition of Clinician-Survivors (which supports clinicians after personal and professional suicide losses) and is on the Board of of Austen Riggs Center, an open residential treatment facility in Stockbridge, MA. She has published several articles about Suicide Loss and Postvention. She is also involved with several organizations which aim to challenge the ways in which suicidal experiences are conventionally understood and treated.ger Smith joined the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT) in 2005. He currently serves as AAMFT’s Chief Advocacy Officer and General Counsel. Roger oversees AAMFT’s Government and Corporate Affairs team, which advocates for AAMFT’s federal and state policy initiatives, and AAMFT’s Ethics and Legal Affairs team, which handles general legal issues for AAMFT. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Purdue University, Roger earned his law degree from the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis.

 

In this podcast episode, we talk about the impact of client suicide on clinicians

Losing a client to suicide is a devastating and often isolating experience for mental health professionals. We asked suicide expert, Dr. Nina Gutin to join us to talk about how therapists can take care of themselves  when they have a client die by suicide.

What do therapists need to know about client suicide and its impact on clinicians?

“The implications of…[the belief] that if suicide is preventable and a suicide happens, then gee, someone must be to blame. And so it isn’t uncommon for clinicians who’ve experienced the loss…[of a] client to feel blameworthy and a lot of guilt, whether or not it’s warranted.” – Dr. Nina Gutin

  • The stigma and self-blame clinicians often experience after losing a client.
  • The importance of using “died by suicide” instead of stigmatizing language.
  • Statistics on clinician loss: One in five mental health professionals—and up to one in two psychiatrists—will experience a client suicide.
  • The need for postvention protocols and structured support in mental health workplaces.
  • How reducing caseloads and fostering support networks can help mitigate the long-term professional impact.

Processing Guilt and Self-Blame After a Client Suicide

  • How hindsight bias can make clinicians feel responsible for a client’s death.
  • Shifting from guilt to remorse or regret as a healthier perspective.
  • The fear of legal repercussions and how to navigate it after a client suicide.
  • Best practices for reaching out to a client’s family with compassion and professionalism.

The Professional and Emotional Toll of Client Suicide on Therapists

“Knowing that you’re not alone in this, and that there are other people who have been there and have healed and now have something to offer, can offer hope that one is not going to be in this sort of disorganized, disenfranchised state forever.” – Dr. Nina Gutin

  • How losing a client to suicide can shake a clinician’s confidence and clinical identity.
  • The importance of workplace support and structured postvention after a client death.
  • Why systemic change is necessary to ensure therapists receive the help they need.

Resources and Support for Clinicians

  • The Coalition of Clinician Survivors – A support network offering:
    • A listserv for peer support.
    • A bibliography of research and clinical resources.
    • Postvention protocols to guide clinicians and organizations.
  • Dr. Nina Gutin’s email – For clinicians seeking consultation (nguten@earthlink.net).

Breaking the Stigma and Advocating for Systemic Support

  • How the stigma around suicide impacts both clients and clinicians.
  • The need for better suicide prevention and postvention training in clinical programs.
  • How organizations can prepare for and respond to client suicides to support their clinicians effectively.

Resources for Modern Therapists mentioned in this Podcast Episode:

We’ve pulled together resources mentioned in this episode and put together some handy-dandy links. Please note that some of the links below may be affiliate links, so if you purchase after clicking below, we may get a little bit of cash in our pockets. We thank you in advance!

Coalition of Clinician Survivors

Dr. Nina Gutin’s Contact Information – nguten @ earthlink.net

 

Relevant Episodes of MTSG Podcast:

When Clients Die:  An interview with Debi Frankle, LMFT

Risk Factors for Suicide: What therapists should know when treating teens and adults

What Therapists Should Actually Do for Suicidal Clients: Assessment, safety planning, and least intrusive intervention

Preventing Client Suicide: An interview with Norine Vander Hooven, LCSW

Suicidal Therapists:  An interview with Norine Vander Hooven, LCSW

Topic: Suicide

 

Who we are:

Picture of Curt Widhalm, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcast; a nice young man with a glorious beard.Curt Widhalm, LMFT

Curt Widhalm is in private practice in the Los Angeles area. He is the cofounder of the Therapy Reimagined conference, an Adjunct Professor at Pepperdine University and CSUN, a former Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences, former CFO of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, and a loving husband and father. He is 1/2 great person, 1/2 provocateur, and 1/2 geek, in that order. He dabbles in the dark art of making “dad jokes” and usually has a half-empty cup of coffee somewhere nearby. Learn more at: http://www.curtwidhalm.com

Picture of Katie Vernoy, LMFT, co-host of the Modern Therapist's Survival Guide podcastKatie Vernoy, LMFT

Katie Vernoy is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, coach, and consultant supporting leaders, visionaries, executives, and helping professionals to create sustainable careers. Katie, with Curt, has developed workshops and a conference, Therapy Reimagined, to support therapists navigating through the modern challenges of this profession. Katie is also a former President of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists. In her spare time, Katie is secretly siphoning off Curt’s youthful energy, so that she can take over the world. Learn more at: http://www.katievernoy.com

A Quick Note:

Our opinions are our own. We are only speaking for ourselves – except when we speak for each other, or over each other. We’re working on it.

Our guests are also only speaking for themselves and have their own opinions. We aren’t trying to take their voice, and no one speaks for us either. Mostly because they don’t want to, but hey.

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Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide Creative Credits:

Voice Over by DW McCann https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/

Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano https://groomsymusic.com/

Transcript for this episode of the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide podcast (Autogenerated):

Transcripts do not include advertisements just a reference to the advertising break (as such timing does not account for advertisements).

… 0:00
(Opening Advertisement)

Announcer 0:00
You’re listening to the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide, where therapists live, breathe and practice as human beings. To support you as a whole person and a therapist, here are your hosts, Curt Widhalm And Katie Vernoy.

Curt Widhalm 0:12
Welcome back, modern therapists. This is the Modern Therapist’s Survival Guide. I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy, and this is the podcast for therapists about the things that come up in our practices, things that happen behind the scenes for therapists, and we have talked about working with suicides in a number of our previous episodes, and had some varying conversations around it over the years. And one of the things that we brought into a couple of our listeners have talked with us about is: Curt and Katie, you’ve had some podcasts about working with suicidal clients. You’ve had some podcasts about working successfully with them. What happens when you don’t? So today, we are joined by Dr. Nina Gutin. She’s a psychologist, and when we looked up resources on what to do when a client dies by suicide, Nina’s name was all over a lot of the search results that we found, and she has been very kind to join us today and to talk about what that process is like.

Katie Vernoy 0:30
We’re so glad to have you. Dr Gutin, Nina, it’s nice to meet you and to start this conversation. The way we start all of our interviews is with this question, Who are you and what are you putting out into the world?

Dr. Nina Gutin 1:30
Well, I’m a psychologist. I’ll start by saying I lost my brother to suicide in 1995. Since then, I’ve worked with a lot of other survivors in general, and then clinician survivors who experience both losses that are personal and losses that are professional, ie of clients or patients, and that has become sort of a specialty area. And so what I hope to put out into the world is to make use of my own experience and what I’ve learned from others in order to create support and resources for other survivors and clinician survivors.

Curt Widhalm 2:19
We’ve also had past episodes on what to do when a client dies. And I think we barely touched on something around suicide in that episode. And we’ll link to that in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. I’m gonna sidestep our normal first question here, where we ask about, you know, what do clinicians get wrong? Because I can only imagine that when we find out that a client has successfully completed a suicide attempt, that there is just a world of feelings and very little guidance and a whole lot of self assigned blame that ends up happening there. So I’m wondering if you can start off just by speaking what’s kind of the typical reactions that somebody is already going through that hopefully normalizes this. But I don’t want this to be a normal thing, but just to not have people feel so alone.

Dr. Nina Gutin 3:15
One thing I want to mention in terms of language, because within the suicide field, it’s always shifting and changing. So even though completed suicide was brought up as an alternative to committed suicide, we realize that too has some connotations. So the word that we’re using now generally, is died by suicide. So that’s just one aside. But I think you’re sort of mentioning the concept of wrong is is very pertinent, because, especially given all of the messaging about, you know, suicide prevention, and initially even Zero Suicide, had put out the term suicide is always preventable. They’ve since backed down from that. But the implications of that, that is that if suicide is preventable and a suicide happens, then Gee, someone must be to blame. And so it isn’t uncommon for clinicians who’ve experienced the loss, and I’m just, I’m going to use the word client to feel blameworthy and a lot of guilt, whether or not it’s warranted. And I want to say that this is actually a very it’s an occupational hazard, and the stats show that about one in five mental health professionals, with the exception of psychiatrists, which I’ll talk about in a second, will lose a client to suicide over the course of the career. For psychiatrists, it’s one and two. So this is, in fact, an occupational hazard, but because it never gets talked about, it’s treated like an aberration. So when this happens, you know, oh well, this person was in treatment, therefore the person who was treating them must have done something wrong. And that very easily gets internalized by the treating clinician. You know, and we know that clinicians can do everything right and still lose clients to suicide, but that messaging doesn’t get out there. So in addition to the guilt, one of the things to realize about losing anyone to suicide, but certainly a client, is who is that it’s a traumatic loss, and therefore it’s not just the intense grief, but trauma symptoms are also very, very common after this loss, and I’ll talk about that more. I’m guessing there might be questions on that impact clinician, not only personally, but in professional domains as well.

Katie Vernoy 5:52
I think for me, the fear of having a client die by suicide is pretty high. I know we’ve talked recently, in some episodes we’ve recorded more recently, about high intensity case loads, about different types of diagnoses that have suicide in their profile more frequently, or suicidal ideation in their profile more frequently. And I think for a lot of clinicians, it’s seen as, I don’t even know if it’s right to say this, but I’m going to say what’s coming into my head, because I don’t want to be shaming, but I also know that I want to name the fear, but that this is kind of the ultimate failure, that we’ve somehow failed our client. And we can know looking at another clinician and having them talk through or consult with us about their experience, and know that they’ve done everything they could, and it was not their failure. That’s not the right word. And so how do you address those things? Or what are the things that clinicians can expect, as far as how they can start processing through whether they are to blame or not? Is it, you know, justified or not that they feel self blame? What does that look like? Those initial stages, I guess.

Dr. Nina Gutin 7:02
The initial stage, and it’s complicated in a clinical setting, because often what happens is they’re not only having their own guilt, but implicitly or explicitly, other colleagues, other staff, supervisors, might be blaming them as well. Again, whether or not it’s warranted at all. And so in that context, it’s hard to even reflect on whether or not it’s warranted. And I think this is true for survivors in general. And I think the guilt and the blame serves a couple of purposes. One is because these losses are so filled with ambiguities, so many questions that cannot be answered. In some ways, guilt and blame can actually help deal with the ambiguity by saying, Oh, I did it, or they did it. And in some ways, it closes that circle that we as humans, we’re not very good at tolerating ambiguity. But in terms of dealing with it, one of the I’m going to quote Jack Jordan, who’s a very esteemed colleague of mine, who talked about how in the guilt after suicide loss is linked to what he calls the tyranny of hindsight. That is, we assume in the aftermath of a suicide loss that we should have known then what we know now, when in fact, then we did the best that we could without knowing what the potential outcome would be. One of the things to, I think, in terms of self care, if you feel like the incessant guilt, this is, I made a mistake, I did this, I did that. And yes, you know, in some ways, even if there was a mistake or you recognize that there was something missed, it’s something to be learned from, because no one doesn’t make mistakes. And again, there’s no way we could have known otherwise. If we’re recognizing that the voices of the blame are only that of a prosecutor to say, if there was a defense attorney, what would she hear they say? And in some ways start the process of self reflecting. Okay, is this truly legitimate? Are there other things that might have been in play, like, was the client too afraid to mention that they were imminently suicidal for fear of being hospitalized, which is a big one. You know, there are a lot of reasons why suicidal clients don’t give clinicians the whole story, and because there are very well based fears about what will happen in the aftermath. So to be able to sort of make the story more complex, and to be able to tolerate the ambiguity in the story can be helpful. And I’m going to quote another esteemed colleague, Paula Marchese, who talked about turning the guilt into either remorse or regret. You know, I wish I had known then what I know now. But that process can’t be forced, and it takes its own time. And as we know, as therapists, it’s, you know, it’s about readiness to sort of really move into that type of reflection about our responses.

Curt Widhalm 10:37
When you’re talking about the feeling of prosecution, or like a prosecutor is standing across. I used to teach a lot ethics classes. Amongst the first discussions and lectures that we would have would be about risk assessments and around all of the historical cases that have ended up in court. And I have to imagine that a lot of the first reaction is just to isolate, to not further incriminate yourself, in case legal action is potentially on the horizon. And I’m wondering if you can speak to just how much more isolating and terrible that have a clinician fearing.

Dr. Nina Gutin 11:16
In addition to that fear, just the issues around confidentiality you’re not allowed to talk to anyone. You can’t say anything to anyone about this. Often lawyers will say, Oh, you’re not even allowed to talk to the to the family. And so that itself creates a lot of isolation. And then on top of that, the fear of litigation drives that even deeper. Now I just want to say a couple of lawyers who deal specifically with suicide cases have urged in relation to reaching out to the family of the person who died by suicide, compassion over caution. And they found that compassionate outreach to the family with the understanding that there might not be able to be a clear disclosure about the client’s details until they know whether the family carries the privilege actually reduces the likelihood of litigation and is more healing for both clinician and for the family members. So the whole mental health system is built around liability, and often the trainings for assessments are built around liability. And that’s a whole other issue, but it’s so built into the system that it’s really hard for impacted clinicians or staff, if it’s like a community mental health or something like that, to feel worthy of blame and shame.

… 12:54
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Katie Vernoy 12:56
In that isolation I feel like there’s a lot of self reflection that can happen, whether it’s healthy or not. I feel like there’s also this element of reevaluating who you are as a clinician. There’s a lot of professional identity things I think would come up. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Dr. Nina Gutin 13:13
Yeah, this has such an impact on our clinical identities, as well as our work in the short term. What’s normative after this is a loss of confidence and a sense of competence. And to the extent that we’re blaming ourselves, we start to question whether or not we should even stay in the field. And I lost my brother when I was in graduate school. And, you know, before that I was doing, I was working clinically at a couple of jobs, and was getting pretty good reviews, and was starting to feel like, oh, maybe I did have something to offer. But after this is like, what right do I have to be doing this work when I couldn’t even save my own brother, you know? And again, when you talk about losing a client, it makes people question whether or not to even stay in the profession. In some ways, the self reflection is so tied to the guilt and the blame and the failure, as opposed to being able to move out of that loop into saying, Oh, I realize this is an occupational hazard. But unlike for medical doctors who know that death is inevitable in this work, since our field doesn’t acknowledge that. There might be other ways to think about that, and we’re I’ll talk more about resources in a bit.

Curt Widhalm 14:44
I watched a good friend who, in her practice had lost a client in recent months, and just watching the process that she went through was, as a good friend and as a good friend of therapists, you know, I’m imagining that she was more open and talking with me about things than most. But there was still just very much a waiting through life kind of thing that I’m trying to imagine, you know, still balancing a rest of a caseload and and wrestling with this. Should I even be doing this? And particularly for those clinicians who are working with other high risk cases at the same time, I’m hoping that part of your answer is, you know, you have a good support network as far as being able to talk about these kinds of things. But how does one realistically continue to work and show up in this process?

Dr. Nina Gutin 15:39
It’s really difficult. Which is why, you know, we have advice for supervisors to advocate for either cutting caseload or making it consist of less, quote, high risk clients, because at least in the short term, again, what’s pretty normal after this loss for clinicians is that our clinical work is impaired, and it can range from sort of hyper vigilance around suicide to a denial and almost like it’s too much, I need to deny that it’s there. People notice all sorts of changes in their clinical work. I remember when I was working with clients with loss issues, I couldn’t access my own empathy because all of my defenses were tied up in defending against that. And to know that some of these aspects are normal and that they’re a result of the intensity and the trauma of the loss can be helpful in the short run. And to be able to either self advocate or advocate, have someone else advocate for you to say, until I’m able to process this more, heal more, if I can get a reduction in again, this sort of intensity, intense, intense case load, that would be great. Because how can it not impact not only our identities, but the work that we do, especially when it’s so close? If we’re working with other high risk clients, we’re going to feel like we’re working on a tightrope, even more more so than we were before. So I would say, just knowing that it’s normal and seeing if what can be done to give ourselves a little a little respite, and, of course, to ideally, try to find someone who has had a similar experience to cut down on that sense of isolation. Because, again, even though it’s unfortunately very frequent, nobody talks about it, because it’s so filled with with shame.

Katie Vernoy 17:55
You spoke about resources, and my assumption is that some of that, some of the resources, are groups, Facebook groups, different things where clinicians who’ve had a client died by suicide, those things might be present. Can you share some of those at this point?

Dr. Nina Gutin 18:11
Yeah. Well, the one that I’m most familiar with is one that I’ve been involved with since about 2003 initially, with one of my colleagues, Vanessa. And again, and that’s it’s currently called the Coalition of Clinician Survivors. And we, we both lost siblings, and I’d done a presentation, written a little article in which I talked about, not only about the sequelae at the loss, but how in the clinical world, there was almost a tendency to pathologize the reaction to the loss. So when I presented on that, I had people come out of the woodwork and said, Oh, I had the same experience. And so Vanessa reached out to me and said, I also shared that experience. And so since then, we’ve decided that both for clinicians who’ve had personal losses, but certainly for clinicians who’ve lost clients, there needs to be a place, a space where people can share experiences without breaking confidentiality, if it’s a client loss, but to go on our listserv and say what’s going on, and other people will say, Yes, I had that same experience. So it will cut down on the sense of isolation and alienation. And we have on our website which it can give you that information momentarily. We’ve got a bibliography, and I’ll credit John McIntosh for keeping that up to date, and personal testimonies from people who have had both types of loss, both personal and clinical losses. So that people can know that they’re not alone, and can learn from each other. And once you’re become a member of our coalition, and it’s free, there’s no cost. There are a couple of people who are actually running both open and closed, 10 week groups that people can have access to. So if they want something a little more intense. Those are some of the resources, there is, it’s not one of ours, but there’s, I’ve been told, there’s a Facebook group for clinicians who’ve lost clients. There are resources, and hopefully they’re becoming easier to find.

… 20:40
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Katie Vernoy 20:40
I think for me, the isolation is a huge part. It sounds like that’s something where these types of resources are really, really helpful. I also just having had some of my own traumatic losses, not by suicide, other things, I recognize that the grief process can be very complicated. And I imagine in this case, whether it’s a close family member who’s died by suicide or a client who’s died by suicide, it’s extremely complex. Can you talk a little bit about the grief process here? Because this seems like it would be fairly intense for a clinician, especially a clinician who was very close to a client that’s died by suicide, or has had a family member who’s died by suicide.

Dr. Nina Gutin 21:24
Yeah, and I think both the intensity and the complexity are complicated by the stigma around suicide, and there’s also a lot of research that shows that that stigma is directed towards survivors, and I think I’ll just want to say that I also think within our field, there’s what I’ll just call professional stigma, which is directed towards colleagues who not only experience but dare to display any type of vulnerability, because it breaks what I think is sort of this, us, them, distinction. We are the healers. We’re the strong ones. They are the ones with vulnerability. So what happens when one of us becomes one of them? So the suffering clinician tends to bear the brunt of everyone else’s projections, you know. So I think there’s the stigma, there’s the grief of the loss. And I know many clinicians who have sort of lost long term clients where they have very deep relationships, and that, again, it’s hard to acknowledge with all of the confidentiality issues and the intertwining with the trauma symptoms that were normative after this. So all of those together make it more intense, more complex than other types of loss. And two, I think it can help to know what’s normative, because often people will say, I feel like I’m going crazy, because the intensity can be so disorienting. But the more people know that, no, they’re not going crazy, this is understandably what happens after this loss, and you’re dealing with a lot of different issues coming from a lot of different directions. And again, knowing that you’re not alone in this, and that there are other people who have been there and have healed and now have something to offer. Can offer hope that one is not going to be in this sort of disorganized, disenfranchised state forever.

Curt Widhalm 23:45
Due to the timing of the loss of your sibling, and going through all of your training in this field, I’m imagining that you have such a unique, different perspective on how suicide has been talked about throughout your career, and what’s just missing in the way that those clinicians who haven’t experienced that kind of loss seem to approach this. And I’m going through the Coalition of Clinician Survivors website here as we’re talking and I love all of the postvention resources that you have on here, and everyone should go and check this out. But I’m also kind of torn as far as people should go and check this out before they ever run into this. And I’m wondering, just kind of through your career and your process, is this something where it’s just kind of been received by even clinicians in trainings that’s just kind of like, oh yeah, that’s something that we’ll get to when we deal with that. But that’s not something that’s affected me yet.

Dr. Nina Gutin 24:50
Where we get more pushback is from organizations who say, Oh no, we do things pretty well. We don’t need that. And then only call us, you know, when there is a suicide. And so what, one of the things that we really advocate is to have what we call postvention protocols in place. Then that means, like to have guidelines and resources available should something like this happen before it happens, rather than scrambling to pull things together in the aftermath? So that’s why we got people who’ve really developed good protocols and are willing to just to share them up on our website. Those protocols not only help explain to people in an agency, for instance, you know how to best support impacted clinicians and staff, but they also talk about the importance of not blaming and shaming and often in the aftermath, if something like this occurs in an agency, there’s what is variously called either a psychological autopsy or some sort of way to sort of look at what happened and to sort of look for gaps or oversights, and to avoid blaming and shaming in that, because clinicians have said, I feel like I’ve just gone through a tribunal, but to the extent that there were things that could have been done better, to identify, say, for instance, gaps in training, and then to sort of see those as something to be corrected, rather than blaming a clinician for not being trained in something that you know if they had been trained in, maybe there might have been a different outcome. Of course, we will never know, because that’s all like the hindsight stuff.

Katie Vernoy 26:47
So even when you’re talking about approaching agencies or potentially groups of clinicians and saying postvention, have a plan, understand what the risks are. You know, get yourself together so that you can manage these things when, if they happen, the response is: We’ll we do a good job. This isn’t going to happen to us. Which still speaks to that bias, and it speaks to that blame. And so I’m curious when you’re successfully able to break through that and get to agencies, group practices, individuals who are really wanting to have this as part of their and I’ll say it because it’s the name of our podcast, their Survival Guide. What is the orientation to take? What can clinicians do before they face this, to really get themselves in a place that this isn’t going to destroy them?

Dr. Nina Gutin 27:38
Well, first of all, to know that it is, in fact, an occupational hazard. To know that, again, I mentioned before that even when they do everything right, if they’ve been well trained, if they’ve been able to deal with their own fears, anxieties, biases, etc, around suicide, and feel like they can put out their best work, they might still lose clients to suicide, and that’s the reality. So in some ways, similar to training in med school, when people know that they can do the best, their best and still lose their patients. You know, optimally, to have similar training about this in place before this happens, so that when it happens, it can lift some of that shame and and self blame, in order to be able to more freely reflect on what happened, and to be more likely to say, Well, I think I followed all the protocols, I covered all the bases, I asked the right questions, and this happened, and you know, to be able to sort of that’s a different perspective than Oh my god, I screwed up.

Curt Widhalm 28:57
Can you tell people where they can find all of the wonderful resources that you and others have put together. So that way, if they are facing the stuff, they’re not doing this all alone for the first time.

Dr. Nina Gutin 29:12
Our website for the Coalition of Clinician Survivors is cliniciansurvivor.org and on that website, you can find the testimonials, the bibliography, the postvention resources and a few other things. And the other thing, there are opportunities to join our listserv. On the listserv, what people can do is introduce themselves, and if people want to be extremely anonymous, we can actually use an alias for them so that we can post what they would want, using the alias on their behalf, but they’d still be able to see the replies. And once they introduce themselves and talk a little bit about their loss, and the circumstances and what’s going on, inevitably, they’re going to get lots of support from other clinicians who’ve been in the same position, and that’s both for clinicians who’ve experienced personal and/or professional losses. I just want to put out a caveat that it might take a little while between submitting the form and getting enrolled, just because it’s all volunteer. No one’s being paid. We’re all trying to do this on top of everything else. So it there’s usually some lag time until we can sort of get to that enrollment. So just don’t feel that we’ve forgotten you. We’re just trying to balance this with all of the other things in our lives.

Katie Vernoy 30:43
Do you also have a place that they can contact you if they would like to reach out to you for some consultation?

Dr. Nina Gutin 30:49
Sure. I can give my email, which is N, G, U, T, I N, that’s ngutin@earthlink.net.

Curt Widhalm 31:00
And we will include links to all of those in our show notes over at mtsgpodcast.com. And follow us on our social media, Facebook, Instagram, join our Facebook group, the Modern Therapist Group, to continue on with this conversation, and until next time, I’m Curt Widhalm with Katie Vernoy and Dr. Nina Gutin.

… 31:19
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Announcer 31:20
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