Exploring physicians’ emotional reactions to suicidal patients: the impact of physician- and patient-related issues
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The physician-patient relationship is essential in the care of suicidal patients, yet factors shaping this relationship remain insufficiently explored. This study aimed to explore physicians' emotional reactions to suicidal patients and how both physician- and patient-related issues influence these responses. METHODS: Interviews were conducted with six physicians from the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal. A thematic analysis was performed using Hayes' structural model of countertransference as the analytical framework. RESULTS: Three primary emotional reactions emerged: emotional connection/avoidance, confidence/doubts, and powerlessness attributed to own limitations/to the patient. Clinicians' core needs-the need to help, need for security, and need for efficacy-were found to be pivotal in shaping these emotional responses. Similarly, patient-related factors, notably life experiences, disease, suicidality, and attitudes significantly influenced these reactions. Patterns linking physicians' emotional responses to their underlying needs and patient-related factors were analyzed, leading to the development of a conceptual framework. CONCLUSIONS: This framework offers implications for research, clinical supervision, and medical training, fostering deeper insight into the physician-patient relationship in the context of suicidality.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".