Editorial

One of the most interesting topics covered in this Special Edition of the Journal is that of the suffering of the suicidal person and the secondary suffering by the clinician working with suicidal clients. These papers were presented at our 5th Annual Conference, held on 9 June 2018. The conference this year marked a special day for us as we were delighted to announce the launch of the Regent's Centre for Relational Studies & Psychological Wellbeing. The conference theme, ‘Perspectives on suicidal ideation and self-harm: the impact on therapists and psychotherapeutic approaches to helping people at risk’ attracted some especially noteworthy contributions. Suicide is sometimes felt like the only option for a person who is suffering. As Friedrich Nietzsche asserts, ‘It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night’. But according to Camus: ‘… in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself’.

Fonagy and Target (in Perelberg, 1999, p. 4) stated: ‘self-destructive and suicidal behaviour is perceived as the only feasible solution to an insoluble dilemma: the freeing of the self from the other through the destruction of the other within the self’. This psychoanalytic understanding of suicide presents the suicidal person as feeling trapped by feelings of violence and aggression towards the internal object/self, so that killing the self represents killing the hated other. Therapist sensitivity and acknowledgement of client suicidal ideation, active or passive, is fundamental to good practice. Learning to normalise clients' pain and suffering that may be channelled into suicidal thoughts is also important to good practice. As Emilie Autumn states: ‘Nothing in my life has ever made me want to commit suicide more than people's reaction to my trying to commit suicide’.

Every author's perspective in this Special Edition leaps out of the pages, where written in pain and hope are the real experiences of therapists who have been