Dr. Sarah Bloch-Elkouby is an Assistant Professor in the adult PsyD program at Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology and an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Mount Sinai Behavioral Health Center. She currently serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, as the Section Editor of the Suicidal and Self-Destructive Behaviors at the Annals of General Psychiatry, and as a consultant in the Center for Alliance-Focused Training. She holds an LLB from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, a BSW from Bar-Ilan University, an MA in clinical psychology and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Derner School of Psychology at Adelphi.
Prior to joining the Ferkauf School of Psychology, Dr. Bloch-Elkouby was the supervising psychologist in the adult and geriatric inpatient unit 6 Karpas at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, where she trained psychology and psychiatry trainees in the assessment and treatment of patients at acute risk for suicidal behaviors. Dr. Bloch-Elkouby’s clinical expertise and research focus on the intersection of suicide risk prevention and psychotherapy process research, taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies such as virtual humans which she incorporates in her clinical training models and research.
Her work on suicidal mental states has contributed to the validation of the Suicide Crisis Syndrome as an acute suicidal condition and a proposed DSM diagnosis. In collaboration with the Galynker Suicide Prevention and Research Lab, Dr. Bloch-Elkouby and colleagues have developed several tools to detect acute suicidal risk, which been translated into more than 15 languages. She has conducted extensive research on the intricate and dynamic interplay between long- and short-term interpersonal and intrapersonal psychological processes that contribute to the emergence of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, leading to the validation of the Narrative Crisis Model of suicide. Dr. Bloch-Elkouby also conducts research on the process and outcome of psychotherapy with minoritized and high-risk patients, focusing on clinical judgment and the therapeutic alliance. Her work on the Suicide Crisis Syndrome and the therapeutic alliance with high-risk patients lays the ground for a new suicide risk assessment and management intervention, the “Integrative Intervention for Suicide Crises within an Alliance and Narrative crisis model framework (I-SCAN)”, which was recently piloted in an inpatient setting.