Background: Although intervention with suicidal patients is one of the hardest tasks in clinical practice, little is known about health professionals’ perceptions about the difficulties of working with suicidal patients. Aims: The aims of this study were to: (1) describe the difficulties of professionals facing a suicidal patient; (2) analyze the differences in difficulties according to the sociodemographic and professional characteristics of the health professionals; and (3) identify the health professionals’ perceived skills and thoughts on the need for training in suicide. Method: A self-report questionnaire developed for this purpose was filled out by 196 health professionals. Exploratory principal components analyses were used. Results: Four factors were found: technical difficulties; emotional difficulties; relational and communicational difficulties; and family-approaching and logistic difficulties. Differences were found between professionals who had or did not have training in suicide, between professional groups, and between the number of patient suicide attempts. Sixty percent of the participants reported a personal need for training and 85% thought it was fundamental to implement training plans targeted at health professionals. Conclusion: Specific training is fundamental. Experiential and active methodologies should be used and technical, relational, and emotional questions must be included in the training syllabus.

Clinical work with suicidal people is a demanding area. Little is known about health professionals’ practices when faced with suicidal patients. The aims of this study were to: (1) describe the practices most likely to be adopted by professionals facing a suicidal patient and (2) analyze the differences according to professional characteristics (group, specific training on suicide, and experience with suicidal patients). A self-report questionnaire that was developed for this study was filled out by 239 participants. Participants were psychologists, psychiatrists, and general practitioners who work in different contexts: hospitals, public health centres, schools or colleges, and community centres. Principal components analysis, analyses of variance, and t-tests were used. Four components were identified: (1) Comprehensive risk assessment; (2) protocols, psychotherapy and connectedness; (3) multidisciplinary clinical approach; and, (4) family, explaining a total of variance of 44%. Positive associations between suicide-related variables (training and experience) and practices were found. In general, health professionals’ practices are evidence-based, however a relevant percentage of professionals can benefit from training and improve their practices.

Williams Syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is characterized by a distinctive neurocognitive and behavioural phenotype, where relative cognitive strengths (e.g., language, narrative production, and face processing) coexist with severe deficits in other cognitive domains (e.g., visual-spatial processing). By using a new scoring system, this study aimed to explore structural (coherence), process (complexity) and content (multiplicity) aspects of fictional narrative production in WS, taking typical development as reference. In this way, it aimed at providing more evidence on the narrative profile of WS, complementing previous studies. Results showed that narratives in individuals with WS are significantly less coherent, diverse and complex relative to controls. Contrasting with typically developing controls' reliance on structural coherence, individuals with WS tend to rely more on the diversity of narrative content as a major narrative device. Additionally, these participants seem to compensate their deficiencies in narrative ability by relying on some social markers of the narrative, such as the emotional commitment with the story telling (i.e., evaluative commitment). Together, these findings bring additional support for the dissociation between expressive/social and cognitive/metacognitive aspects of narrative production in WS