Adolescent suicide is a profound psychological and systemic crisis that reverberates through students, families, faculty, and the institutional life of a school. Psychologists are frequently called upon to provide clinical intervention, consultation, and leadership under conditions of acute trauma, grief, and heightened risk for suicide contagion—often with limited preparation for the complex ethical, developmental, and systemic challenges involved.

This two-hour continuing education program provides psychologists with a clinically rigorous framework for responding to adolescent suicide within school communities. Drawing on research in trauma psychology, suicide postvention, adolescent development, and group dynamics, the program examines the psychological impact of suicide exposure, including acute stress reactions, complicated grief, survivor guilt,identification with the deceased, and destabilization of peer systems.

The training addresses suicide contagion as a distinct developmental and social phenomenon, with attention to the influence of peer identification, media exposure, and social media amplification. Participants will learn to evaluate school-based communication, memorialization practices, and postvention strategies for their psychological impact and risk implications.

The program further emphasizes the psychologist's consultative role with school administrators, faculty, and parents, offering guidance on supporting traumatized adults while maintaining ethical boundaries, professional competence, and cultural sensitivity. Ethical decision-making, risk management, and clinician self-care are integrated throughout the training.

Presenter's Bio

Amelio A. D’Onofrio, PhD is former Clinical Professor and Director of the Psychological Services Institute in the Graduate School of Education at Fordham University. He served on the Fordham faculty from 1994–2019 and, for the final sixteen years of that tenure, was Coordinator of Training in the Doctoral Program in Counseling Psychology. His approach to psychotherapy and supervision is grounded in psychoanalytic theory and deeply informed by the existential philosophical tradition—with its attention to the tragic and transcendent dimensions of human life. Dr. D’Onofrio holds degrees in Theology and Psychology (Georgetown University), Religion and Psychological Studies (The University of Chicago Divinity School), and Counseling Psychology (Fordham University). Clinically, his work explores the ways in which originary traumatic wounds inscribe themselves upon and colonize the unconscious; how they fragment meaning and generate ontological insecurity; how guilt permeates the psyche and drives repetition; and how such dynamics constrict the emergence of authentic subjectivity. In his supervision and teaching, Dr. D'Onofrio is especially devoted to the relational conditions through which the therapist's own psychology—its listening capacities, its containment, and its limits—either frees or forecloses the unconscious, allowing healing and transformation to take root. As an educator, he is passionate about cultivating experiences of the therapeutic encounter, not merely conceptual understandings about therapy—inviting students into the living dynamics of clinical work. Dr. D'Onofrio has also served as Chief of the Residential Psychosocial Rehabilitation Program for dual-diagnosed homeless veterans and as Chief of Education Service within New York-area U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Centers. He currently maintains a psychotherapy and clinical supervision practice in New York City and consults with schools and mental health agencies.

More Information and Registration Coming Soon!