Brett A. Seabury, DSW. ACSW
School of Social Work
The University of Michigan
1080 S. University
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
This workshop will demonstrate an interactive program that is designed to teach students and beginning practitioners how
to assess suicidal risk in clients. This CD-ROM based program includes a PowerPointÔ tutorial on suicidal risk, an
interactive video program that simulates an interview with a client (Rube) who is actively suicidal, and a quiz that ties the
tutorial to the interactive video simulation.
The tutorial is composed of 118 frames that cover the basic concepts of suicide assessment and intervention - i.e. right to
die issues, cultural and demographic factors, risk factors, assessment scales, and intervention strategies. The interactive
video simulation is composed of sixty-two audio-visual files. These files are inter-connected by questions that the student
can ask Rube. As the interview progresses, students are given choices (usually three) about what they might say to Rube.
Each choice takes the student to a different audio-visual sequence of the program.
Because Rube has been dragged into the interview by his distraught wife, he is reluctant to talk with the student. When the
student enters the simulation, s/he must sign in and describe her/his basic demographic identity groups - i.e. gender and
race/ethnicity. When these categories are checked, different beginning sequences for the interview are triggered. The client
Rube, who is portrayed as an elderly, white, rural, working class farmer, gives the student an explicitly hard time about his
reluctance to talk with someone from a different identity group. For example, to students who check Asian American
female, Rube asks: "How long have you been in the country? Are you an American?" If students are careful about what
information they gather from Rube, they will be able to hear what is going on in his life and what seems to have pushed
him into his active, suicidal state.
The quiz is composed of 25 questions covering major concepts in suicide prevention that can be applied to the simulated
interview with Rube (e.g. "Apply the four parts of the SLAP scale to Rube's life situation.") Students are warned that
before taking the quiz, they should probably interview Rube at least three times and complete the whole tutorial at least
once.
This program is designed as a self-instructional tutorial which usually can be completed in about two hours by a
conscientious student, or it can be used in a classroom setting with computer assisted projection system. This is the latest
interactive video program developed by this author, and only eight graduate social work students have completed this
program as a class assignment. The evaluations of these students, however, is as positive as an earlier interactive program
on crisis theory. Over two hundred students have completed this earlier interactive program, and the evaluations of this
interactive format were very positive. This program is now being made available to agencies, educators, and students in a
CD-ROM format. In this format the computer necessary to play Rube requires a Pentium II computer with a CD-ROM
player. RealMediaÔ player must be installed in the computer to play the interactive video simulation, and Adobe Acrobat
must be installed to play the tutorial.
The CD-ROM also contains an evaluation questionnaire which the author hopes will be returned as students in other universities and staff in field agencies complete this program. This program is being distributed as share ware with a minimal price of $5 to cover the basic costs of reproducing the CD-ROM disks. This program and others are also available on-line over the Internet, but the end user must have a high speed connection to the Ethernet in order to view (i.e.stream) the video simulation.
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