Understand Suicidality and Self-Harm via Language: A Webinar for Clinicians

Are you a clinician working with people who are suicidal or who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI)? Would you like to learn how people’s everyday language can offer a window into their inner psychological worlds?

Join me for a webinar designed specifically for clinicians who want to understand how language can reveal meaningful insights into suicidality and self-harm. This free, research-based session is ideal for clinicians and trainees – including therapists, psychologists, and counsellors – who are interested in language and how it can unobtrusively reflect internal states, thoughts, emotions, and risk patterns. We will explore how analysing language can help us understand and even anticipate behaviours such as self-harm, with practical examples and case-based applications for clinical practice.

Key Takeaways

• Understand the value of natural language as a lens into people’s psychological states and functioning
• Learn the basic principles of language analysis in the context of psychology and mental health
• Explore how specific language patterns may help identify individuals at high risk of suicidality and NSSI, and anticipate periods of elevated risk

About the Webinar

The analysis of natural language provides a powerful approach to understanding self-harm – including both suicidality and non-suicidal self-injury – because a person’s language use can reflect their underlying psychology, thoughts, motivations, and behaviours. Observing the spontaneous words people use can offer unique insight into the individual-level processes that precede, accompany, and follow acts of self-harm.

Recent technological advances have expanded our ability to analyse language rapidly, and at scale, using automated computational tools. In this talk, I will introduce the value of natural language in understanding people, outline the basic principles of language analysis in mental health research, and present findings from our recent study using real-world online forum data from high-risk individuals (i.e., people with personality disorders).

These findings highlight person-centred language patterns that may indicate who is at heightened risk of particularly problematic self-harm and help anticipate when risk is likely to increase. I will also discuss how these insights can be translated into clinical practice, including ways to observe and interpret language patterns in client work.

Speaker Biography

Dr Charlotte Entwistle (PhD, Lancaster University) is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Psychology Department at the University of Liverpool. Her research uses computational language analysis – alongside other computational methods – to deepen understanding of psychosocial phenomena, with a particular focus on psychopathology and personality. In her work, she analyses individuals’ everyday language and online behaviour to gain insight into their inner psychological worlds. Her publications and other activities can be found below:

https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/charlotte-entwistle

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=yhP-dgMAAAAJ

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-entwistle-1494b7178/