TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 2-FULL ISSUE

260 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 2 Discussion Client suicide is a painful personal and professional experience for counselors (Ellis & Patel, 2012). Unfortunately, client suicide is not a rare occurrence for counselors (McAdams & Foster, 2000). For the purpose of our study, we examined how organizational and supervisory support might mitigate the impact of the client suicide on counselor well-being. We also examined the supports offered in various work environments and the perceived helpfulness of this outreach in counselor survivor coping. Supervisory Support Our first research question was related to the effect of supervisor and organizational support on the impact of client suicide on the counselor survivor. Based on our findings, stronger supervisor relationships seemed to help participants process their experience of client suicide. This may align with Knox et al. (2006), who suggested that negative interactions with supervisors can prohibit the counselor’s coping. Conversely, supportive supervisory interactions, such as those actions that address counselor survivors’ grief and loss experiences (e.g., accepting responses, openly discussing the loss and trauma, creation of a safe environment), could have a lasting impact on the counselor survivors’ recovery (Ellis & Patel, 2012). According to Broadbent (2013), supportive supervision assisted grieving counselors in experiencing greater empathy and connectedness within their future therapeutic relationships. Effective supervision included developing a safe place in which supervisees felt “heard and witnessed” and affirmed (Broadbent, 2013, p. 268). We did not find supervisory relationships to have a significant impact on participants’ experience at the present. We suspect that one reason for the lack of impact of supervisory relationships on the current impact of events was that the grief and trauma may have changed and lessened over time, as evidenced by a dramatic reduction in mean scores between IES-Rp and IES-Rc (45 and 27 respectively). Similarly, other life events may have influenced the counselor survivors between the suicide of their client and the present which could serve to diminish the impact of the supervisory relationship on how participants perceived client suicide. Implications for Mental Health Organizations Surprisingly, we found no effect of organizational support and the impact of the event on counselor survivors. A number of questions from the SPOS were focused on the employee’s contribution, accomplishments, and effort. However, when coping with client suicide participants reported a desire for emotional care and support. Based on our quantitative data, the support participants perceived from agencies did not influence the IES scores, but participants’ qualitative responses revealed they valued agency responses that demonstrated support for the counselor as a person (e.g., additional counseling, empathy, debriefings related to the counselor’s experience). Participants expressed a desire for agencies to treat themmore holistically, and to recognize that they had experienced a trauma. Other researchers also indicated need for empathic support for the clinician following a client suicide. For example, Ellis and Patel (2012) expressed that “clinicians and supervisors should recognize the right (and responsibility) to engage in self-care activities following a client’s suicide” (p. 285). In contrast, our participants reported finding administrative responses focused on agency liability (e.g., chart audit, debriefings related to the actions of the counselor survivor) as unhelpful. Nearly half of participants indicated that debriefings were helpful. Participant responses to open- ended questions indicated that debriefings were helpful when focused on the emotional experience of the event. In practice, agencies can work to enhance the debriefing procedures they use. The authors