AWARE: Improving Clinical Decisions and Critical Conversations in Crisis Care

In this course, Dr. Manaan Kar Ray (Director, Mental Health, Princess Alexandra Hospital; Associate Professor, Institute for Suicide Prevention and Research, Griffith University) explains the suicide prevention program components which were generated as a result of thematic analysis of a qualitative study he undertook with colleagues on clinician decision-making in the face of suicidality. There are five program components comprising the AWARE program, an acronym for Anxiety, Weighting, Agenda, Resource, and Experience, with each component representing one heuristic theme that influenced decision-making in the study. Dr. Kar Ray shows how the desire to reduce anxiety when a client is suicidal results in clinicians making “rationalised” rather than “rational” decisions in order to quell the anxiety, and proposes safeguards against clinician subjectivity in assessment.