TPC Journal-Vol 10- Issue 2-FULL ISSUE

262 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 2 Although organizations and supervisors may have informal responses to counselor survivors and clinical teams, researchers (e.g., Michel, 1997; Ting et al., 2006) have argued that a formal policy can have some beneficial effects. Postvention is an organized response that provides “psychological support, crisis intervention and other forms of assistance” to survivors of suicide (Higher Education Mental Health Alliance, 2018, p. 6). Based on our findings, helpful formal postvention policies include debriefing of the counselor survivor’s emotional experience, suggested time off for self-care and personal counseling, and recommended follow-up trainings for handling future suicidality in clients. Larger mental health treatment teams such as community mental health agencies or university counseling centers may develop a postvention team that creates a hierarchy and communication chain for informing appropriate parties (including the counselor survivor) in a timely and sensitive manner. Michel (1997) suggested this postvention should include tiered plans specific to staff levels (e.g., therapists, supervisors, administration) that take into consideration confidentiality and the professional closeness of the employee to the client. Thus, responses to those who work closely with the client (e.g., counselor survivors) may be different than to those who are more removed from the client (e.g., administration). Beyond simply having an action plan, based on our findings and our literature review (e.g., Dransart et al., 2017), we believe that agencies should specifically focus on trainings conducted as preventative measures. Some trainings should include information on how to recognize factors that increase suicide risk among clients. Additional needed trainings may address how to respond to high-risk clients and clients who report suicidal ideations or intent. Limitations and Future Research Our study was a cross-sectional survey study; as such, we were only able to examine one point in time. We asked participants to reflect on their experiences of client suicide and how it impacted them at the time, as well as how they currently experienced the impact. The passage of time likely influenced participants’ memories of their traumatic experience and might have impacted our results. Because of these limitations, future longitudinal examination of the experience of client suicide may be warranted. Our low response rate, though acceptable based on the niche population (Dillman et al., 2014), and our use of convenience sampling inherently reduces the generalizability of our findings. We cannot claim that the counselors we found through this method are representative of all counselor survivors. As such, future research that can reach a more representative sample of counselors who have experienced a client suicide could be valuable in reproducing our findings. There also may be some limitations with our scales. The IES-R scale was originally created to account for the impact of events as perceived within the last 7 days (Weiss & Marmar, 1997) and our use of the IES for recalling past experiences has limited supporting evidence. In addition, the SPOS scale may have been focused more on the organizational structure as opposed to the immediate working environment the counselor survivors faced. Although our findings are generally consistent with previous researchers (e.g., Ellis & Patel, 2012; Michel, 1997), they should be considered in light of these limitations. Summary and Implications for Counseling Our findings highlight client suicide as a traumatic event for counselor survivors and their subsequent desire for emotional support in the aftermath. Our results inform counselors and mental health agencies of ways they can provide an active and emotionally aware response that recognizes the impact of the event and the myriad of emotions the counselor survivor might be experiencing. Our findings especially indicate the need for counselors to receive supportive supervision (e.g., that supervisors are