The Professional Counselor | Volume 11, Issue 3 335 Crisis intervention training among school counselors also was poor. Comparable to the finding on suicide prevention training, a third of these school counselors reported no graduate training in crisis intervention. Further, more than a third reported that they did not receive postgraduate training hours in crisis intervention, and nearly half received between 1 and 10 hours of postgraduate training. A significant portion of these school counselors were not adequately prepared to respond to crises in their schools. These findings are slightly worse than the findings from 20 years ago when one third of a sample of school counselors reported that they entered the field with no formal crisis intervention coursework (Allen et al., 2002). However, these findings are much better than Wachter Morris and Barrio Minton’s (2012) study in which only 20% of school counselors completed a course in crisis intervention during their master’s degree program. Although preparation has increased, crisis preparation for school counseling students must continue to improve given that school counselors regularly experience crises (Wachter, 2006) and school counseling students often experience crises while still in graduate school completing their practicum or internship (Wachter Morris & Barrio Minton, 2012). The number of school counselors who experienced a student suicide event in the current study also supports the notion that school counselors regularly experience crises. Most of these school counselors (61.5%) were not trained in their graduate programs for suicide postvention. Half of the surveyed school counselors reported that they received no postgraduate training hours in suicide postvention, with an additional 38% reported having received between 1 and 10 hours of postgraduate training. These results demonstrate that the vast majority of school counselors are not prepared to respond to a student’s suicidal death. This finding is distressing because school counselors play a vital role in the aftermath of a student suicide (Maples et al., 2005; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], 2016). Suicide Assessment Self-Efficacy Among these counselors, exposure to suicide alone did not make a difference with their suicide assessment self-efficacy or workplace anxiety. Years of school counseling experience appears to have a much more important role in suicide assessment self-efficacy and reduced anxiety than experiencing a student’s death by suicide. This result supports previous studies that found that years of experience has a positive relationship with self-efficacy (Douglas & Wachter Morris, 2015; Kozina et al., 2010; Lent et al., 2003). It also parallels the previous finding that the impact of a client’s suicidal death on a mental health practitioner decreases as the practitioner gains years of experience (McAdams & Foster, 2002). This result is different from Stickl Haugen et al.’s (2021) finding that school counselors who were exposed to a student death had higher levels of suicide assessment self-efficacy than those not exposed. However, Stickl Haugen et al. did not control for years of school counseling experience. In contrast, exposure to suicide attempts did make a difference in suicide assessment self-efficacy. Even after controlling for years of experience, counselors with suicide attempt experience reported more efficacy in three of four subscales: General Suicide Assessment, Assessment of Personal Characteristics, and Suicide Intervention. One explanation for this outcome is that a student suicide attempt experience might motivate school counselors to learn about suicide and the risk factors associated. This explanation echoes Wagner et al.’s (2020) finding that counselors found additional training in the aftermath of a suicide very helpful. Many of the school counselors in the current study received no formal training, so it is possible that these experiences helped them fill in knowledge gaps, which in turn increased their self-efficacy. Training increases self-efficacy (Al-Darmaki, 2004; Mirick et al., 2016; Wachter Morris & Barrio Minton, 2012), so it is also possible that this experience worked as an in vivo training for these school counselors, increasing their self-efficacy.
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