Managing and Assessing Suicidality With the CAMS Framework

Suicide was the tenth (second for youth) leading cause of death for all age groups in 2012¹ and remains a national public health prevention priority. There is a gap in suicide-specific intervention training for mental health professional students and clinicians.²

Training mental health clinicians in a systematic suicide-specific intervention is consistent with the 2012 National Strategy on Suicide Prevention³ and is known to decrease clinicians’ anxiety and fears, dispel myths, and improve clinical practice.⁴  

For the first time, a group of 35 psychiatric mental health advanced practice nurses were trained in the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS),⁵ a therapeutic clinical framework last month at the American Psychiatric Nurses Association (APNA) Annual Meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a CAMS trainer and researcher, I conducted the training.⁶

CAMS is a structured, clinical approach to assess, monitor, and intervene with a patient at risk for suicide.⁵ The process enhances the therapeutic alliance and increases treatment motivation. CAMS includes the use of Problem-Focused Treatment (PFT) and a written template, the Suicide Status Form (SSF). PFT targets and treats the drivers of suicidality, develops a suicide-specific plan, and ultimately increases positive coping and reasons for living.  

Clinical research on CAMS was initiated 25 years ago by its developer, David Jobes, PhD, a professor of psychology at The Catholic University of America.⁷ The CAMS intervention has been implemented in clinical services with college populations, youth in residential treatment, military and veteran populations, patients in outpatient and inpatient programs, and international populations by a variety of mental health disciplines.^8-10

The evidence base for the program’s effectiveness includes well-powered studies: six correlational studies, one randomized trial over several decades, and an open trial. These studies support feasibility and clinical use of CAMS with suicidal outpatients and inpatients.^11-14