How Do I Help Suicidal Kids?

How I Became a Mentalizing Therapy Supervisor, Part I

I'm Owen Muir. I am a psychiatrist. This article is adapted from 2017, when I was completing my Fellowship in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. Still, I was already a Supervisor in Mentalization Based Treatment through the Anna Freud Centre after 4 Years of rigorous and expensive additional training in that evidence-based modality as it applied to borderline and antisocial personality disorders. I was also trained in the approach to youth. In this article, I do my best o explain what this modality is and how it helped me understand working with those suffering from severe suicidal ideation. I understand more now, of course, but I think the lessons I learned before I had tools like neuromodulation hold up well enough.

I worked in a Children’s State Hospital

My days are spent doing a bunch of different things, which is true for people who are child psychiatrists. Virtually all child psychiatrists are also adult psychiatrists. And (at the time) I worked in t…