Counseling Crisis, Trauma, and Suicide Assessment — Questions and Answers
Question 1: During a suicide risk assessment, which factor is generally considered the strongest predictor of imminent risk?
- A specific plan with available means and intent (Correct answer)
- Feeling sad in the past month
- A family history of depression
- Recent job change
Correct answer: A specific plan with available means and intent
A specific plan, access to lethal means, and stated intent signal high acute risk. The other options are risk factors but do not indicate imminence.
Question 2: Which of the following best describes the primary goal of crisis intervention?
- Resolving the client's underlying personality issues
- Restoring the client to the pre-crisis level of functioning (Correct answer)
- Producing insight into childhood conflicts
- Developing a long-term treatment plan
Correct answer: Restoring the client to the pre-crisis level of functioning
Crisis intervention is short-term and focuses on stabilization, safety, and a return to precrisis functioning, not on deep personality change.
Question 3: A counselor is working with a client who has just experienced a natural disaster. Which approach is most appropriate in the immediate aftermath?
- Psychological first aid (Correct answer)
- Intensive psychoanalysis
- Detailed trauma narrative processing
- Long-term exposure therapy
Correct answer: Psychological first aid
Psychological first aid focuses on safety, comfort, practical assistance, and connection to resources in the immediate aftermath. Deeper trauma processing is generally delayed until the person is stabilized.
Question 4: Which of the following is a trauma-informed care principle?
- Emphasizing the counselor's authority over decisions
- Promoting safety, trustworthiness, choice, and collaboration (Correct answer)
- Requiring clients to disclose trauma details at intake
- Avoiding discussion of cultural background
Correct answer: Promoting safety, trustworthiness, choice, and collaboration
Trauma-informed care emphasizes safety, trustworthiness and transparency, peer support, collaboration, empowerment, voice and choice, and attention to cultural, historical, and gender issues.
Question 5: A client discloses a specific plan to harm a named person. Which duty is the counselor most likely to have, based on Tarasoff and its successors?
- Duty to warn and protect the identifiable victim (Correct answer)
- Duty to keep the information confidential in all cases
- Duty to terminate counseling immediately
- Duty to diagnose the client
Correct answer: Duty to warn and protect the identifiable victim
Tarasoff and subsequent state laws established a duty to warn or protect identifiable potential victims from serious threats of violence. Specific requirements vary by jurisdiction.
Question 6: According to Caplan's crisis theory, a crisis is most likely to occur when:
- Usual coping strategies fail to resolve a hazardous event (Correct answer)
- A person has a long-standing mental illness
- A person lacks any social support
- A person is in therapy
Correct answer: Usual coping strategies fail to resolve a hazardous event
Crisis theory holds that a crisis develops when a hazardous event overwhelms the person's usual problem-solving and coping methods, producing disequilibrium.
