| Sumario: | Aim: To explore what psychiatric healthcare personnel experience as challenging in suicide risk assessment situations and how they manage them. Design: A qualitative inductive design with a latent approach was employed. Method: A total of 12 volunteer interviews were conducted with psychiatric nurses, general nurses, and psychiatrists working in both outpatient and inpatient psychiatric care. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: Two themes emerged from the analysis: "the patient within the assessment situation" and "professionals" approaches and strategies. Hard‐to‐assess patients are associated with bringing a masked sense of reality into the assessment situation. Factors that complicate suicide risk assessment could be influenced by the patient's degree of illness in terms of specific diagnoses, life story, and previous experiences in psychiatric care. With experience and an understanding of the distribution of responsibility between the patient and themselves, healthcare professionals can form honest and real assessment situations in which accountability through awareness could counteract the dynamic inherent in masking reality. Conclusion: The assessment is complicated, since the hard‐to‐assess patient brings a sensation of "escaping reality" into the situation, which makes assessment difficult. In this case, the ability to perceive the patient beyond what is seen and heard becomes pivotal. Gut feeling, resulting from experience and the ability to perceive the patient, is crucial to forming a solid foundation for the assessment. Both intuition and consciously chosen techniques are identified as being used in tandem. Implication for the Profession and/or Patient Care: This study seeks to enhance the management of daily clinical practice for professionals handling suicide risk assessment situations by outlining the implications during clinical encounters. Reporting Method: The study was conducted in accordance with COREQ guidelines. Patient or Public Contribution: Psychiatric healthcare professionals contributed to this study by sharing their experiences through interviews.
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