The Samaritans are one of the most well-known suicide prevention organizations, helping individuals in distress via telephone, email and even through postal mail, over 5 million times a year (Pollack et. al. 2008) The Samaritans teach their volunteers the skills of active listening and the value of self-determination, and therefore most Samaritan organizations use no caller…
Tag: suicide risk assessment
Designing Safety Plans with Suicidal Individuals
A safety plan is a written list of those activities that allow us to do three things: Recognize when a crisis is occurring Recognize who our supports are Make immediate next-steps for planning Safety plans are not checklists, and they should not be used in place of having a real conversation. They help provide a sense…
Review of Suicide Risk Assessment Applications
A short post today; while considering embarking on a side project to develop an iOS or Android application it occurred to me that suicide prevention and crisis intervention are areas where mobile applications could certainly come in handy (as well as case management.) I downloaded an Android emulator and several free apps to prevent suicide:…
Crisis Call Outcome Form
The Crisis Call Outcome Form (CCOF) is a tool used to measure the impact of telephone crisis calls. It was originally used in a 1989 study in the Journal of Community Psychology (Echterling & Hartsough, 1989) to help them determine the stages or phases of helping in successful crisis calls to the Lafeyette Crisis Center….
SAFE-T Tool for Suicide Risk Assessment
The SAFE-T tool is a five-step process for suicide risk assessment based on the Practice Guidelines for the Assessment and Treatment of Patients With Suicidal Behaviors, it gives clinicians a series of steps to check for in performing suicide risk assessments to make sure that they are meeting the minimum standard of care. The five elements (which…