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I’ve spent the last several months crafting a PowerPoint for a presentation I was asked to give at a social work conference in July in Chicago. The coordinator of the conference had read a post I wrote on suicide almost 15 years ago and asked me if I could adapt it to a 90-minute presentation. I was flattered and excited and said yes without thinking the whole thing through.

It wasn’t so much the research, the outlining and finally, developing the 135 slides, although that took what seemed countless hours. What’s getting to me is the thought of the public speaking. I’ve given readings of my own published writing before, but this is different. The forum is a professional conference, and the audience will be other clinicians: social workers and psychologists, maybe nurses and/or nurse practitioners, perhaps even a stray psychiatrist or........

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