DEFINITION

• Safety Planning, or a Safety Planning Intervention (SPI), is a technique meant to reduce the risk of suicide among patients presenting with suicidal ideation or clinically assessed to be a danger to themselves in the future.[1]
• The intervention involves having a health care provider work with the patient to develop a personalized Safety Plan for how they will respond if they have suicidal thoughts after leaving the hospital.
• The six components of a Safety Plan include recognizing warning signs, using internal coping strategies, using social situations to distract from suicidal thoughts, contacting family and friends for help, contacting mental health professionals, and reducing access to lethal means.
• Safety planning is associated with reductions in suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations, as well as increases in outpatient appointment attendance.[2]
• Safety planning is typically a collaborative effort between the patient and a health care provider who has been fully trained in the modality. However, clinicians can effectively support patients even with minimal training, and increasingly, patients may self-initiate safety planning with the help of online or phone-based applications.
• For this module, “Safety Planning” refers primarily to the six-step Safety Planning Intervention developed by Stanley and Brown. “Crisis Response Planning” is an abbreviated form of safety planning that typically uses a small card to write out steps to identify personal warning signs, coping strategies, ways to organize social support, and ways to reach out to mental health professionals. [3][4]