Navigating Client Deaths in the Community Mental Health Center: A Humanistic Approach to Clinical Supervision

Abstract

Mental health providers in community mental health centers (CMHCs) often contend with patient deaths but there is little established guidance in the literature in regard to clinical supervision following these losses in general, and making meaning of these experiences specifically. Following a brief review of relevant literature, the authors offer four identified challenges to a meaning-making supervisory approach. Namely, these are (a) determining a supervisory response, (b) disenfranchisement of grief in professionals, (c) a hyperfocus on quantifiable outcomes, and (d) an outsized focus on risk response. The authors contend that a humanistically-oriented, meaning-making response guided by the recovery model provides answers to these challenges, and present a case study demonstrating how these have been navigated in a CMHC.