Suicide and suicide attempt/self-harm among patients evoke various strong feelings in the participants, such as sadness, guilt, anger,frustration, fear, helplessness, and feelings of having failed. These painful emotions are common following a patient's suicidalb behavior. In addition, one nurse's sadness was accompanied with relief after a patient suicide, which is less reported. However, people bereaved by suicide have described relief as part of the reaction when the suicide is the end of a long period of suffering and difficulties. Several participants reported that caring for potentially suicidal patients was emotionally straining, particularly when the patient repeatedly self-harmed, and that they sometimes needed to share the burden or take a break. This is consistent with previous findings where caring for patients who harm themselves repeatedly have been challenging and frustrating. Nurses might be burdened with feelings or feel traumatized after asuicide/suicide attempt.Some of the emotional burden may be related to the projection of painful emotionsfrom the patient, which might evoke negative feelings in the mental health nurse that can, at worst, trigger self-harm in a patient.maintained that suicidal patients might find it difficult to share their distressing feelings, and thus project those feelings onto the professional and then possibly evoke countertransference reactions. Recognizing transferencecountertransference processes and managing one's own emotions in a professional way is important to avoid acting out negative countertransference reactions. Mental health nurses' care of potentially suicidal patients seems to involve a great deal of ‘emotional labor’, a concept developed by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild .Hochschild argued that jobs with face-to-face or voice contact with the public imply ‘emotional labor’ with thepurposetoaffectthe emotional state in others in a desirable way and to act in an appropriate and socially accepted manner. The author suggested that the emotional work is influenced by ‘feeling rules’ and ‘display rules’. Furthermore, the emotional labor may beperformed through either ‘deep acting’ or ‘surface acting’. In our study, both techniques seem to be involved when the mental health nurses attempt to feel and appear calm, confident and caring, or to just appear as such, when they encounter distressed and suicidal patients. Being calm, attempting to not being overwhelmed by the patient's strong emotions and suppressing/concealing one's own feelings may protect the professionals from being too involved and weakening their clinical judgment.