Category: Suicide Category: Suicide (show less) Other: Utah Other: Utah (show less)

Suicide may be one of the most challenging issues that social workers address in our professional careers. When facing suicidality in our client populations, we often experience such challenging things as intense responsibility for the lives of our clients, feelings of helplessness or inadequacy, and fears of liability. In this workshop, we will seek to better understand suicide from the eco biopsychosocial - spiritual perspective, that considers the many cultural contexts and developmental dimensions of being human. We social workers traditionally emphasize contextual practice as well as social justice issues, so we will look at suicide both contextually and through a social justice lens, from the micro, mezzo, and macro levels of social work practice. What makes life worth living for any of us? As we know, it can be both wonderful and challenging to be a human being, and we are all living in an especially challenging time, with such issues as pandemic, climate change, political polarization, and growing inequality of income and wealth confronting all of us. We will explore these local and global issues that humanity faces today with both didactic and experiential learning approaches.