Funded By: National Institute Of Health

VERG Researchers: Heng Yao

Collaborators: 

Target Audience: Patients at risk for suicide

Technology Used: Virtual People Factory (C#, Javascript), Unity

Description: Working with patients at risk for suicide is highly stressful for clinicians and often elicits powerful negative emotional responses that may adversely affect suicidal outcomes. A proposed explanation has been that negative emotional responses may result in less empathic communication and unwitting rejection of the patient, which is liable to damage the therapeutic alliance. Thus, there is a need for clinician training in the effective management of negative emotions towards suicidal patients, which can result in tangible improvement in suicidal outcomes. The training must be web-based, scalable and easy to disseminate, making it available to clinicians everywhere.

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