The other side of the hill: counsellor trainees’ suicide literacy and stigmatising attitudes

ABSTRACT

Despite the crucial role of mental health professionals in suicide prevention, little is known about mental health professionals’ suicide literacy and attitudes towards suicide in Turkey. Therefore, the aims of this research are twofold: First, we investigated counsellor trainees’ suicide knowledge and stigmatising attitudes. Second, we examined the relationship between suicide literacy and attitudes of counsellor trainees. A total of 344 counsellor trainees were recruited for this study through convenience sampling in Turkey. The descriptive statistics demonstrated that most of the counsellor trainees had a lack of knowledge about causes/nature, risk factors, and signs of suicide. Additionally, the participants had stigmatising attitudes towards individuals who died by suicide. Most importantly, the canonical correlation analysis revealed that the counsellor trainees’ stigmatising attitudes towards individuals who died by suicide were negatively associated with their suicide literacy. The insights gained from this study may be of assistance to design suicide-sensitive counsellor education programs.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicide literacy
• stigmatising attitudes towards suicide
• counsellor trainees
• counsellor education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

The authors would be ready to share the data sets as supplementary material upon request by the editor, co-editor, reviewers or other scholars.

Additional information

Funding

This study did not receive any funding.

Notes on contributors

Bünyamin Atay

Bünyamin Atay is a research assistant at the Department of Psychological Counselling and Guidance at TED University, Turkey. He is also a doctoral student at the same department at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. His research interests lie in the field of psychological wellbeing, youth unemployment, career counselling, Psychology of Working Theory.

Begüm Serim-Yıldız

Begüm Serim-Yıldız is an assistant professor at the Department of Psychological Counselling and Guidance at TED University, Turkey. Her academic interests are childhood fears, professional ethics and counselling with children and adolescence. She is currently offering several courses including ethics in counselling, developmental psychology, and counselling with children and adolescence.