How to Handle a Mental Health Crisis
What to do — for yourself or someone you love — in an acute mental health crisis.
Immediate steps
If you or someone else is in immediate danger of harm, call or text 988 (the U.S. Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or your local emergency number. The 988 number connects to trained crisis counselors 24/7 and is free. SAMHSA's national helpline (1-800-662-4357) is another always-available resource. Do not wait to see if the situation resolves on its own.
In the next 48 hours
Reduce access to means of harm where possible — medications, firearms, and other lethal means should be temporarily removed or secured. Stay with the person, or stay in close contact, until acute risk has passed. Make a plan for the next professional contact: same-day if possible, within 48 hours at the latest.
Working with this material on your own
Most people who read a guide like this one read it once and never come back. That is a missed opportunity. The ideas behind How to Handle a Mental Health Crisis repay re-reading, especially after you have tried the techniques in real situations and noticed where they helped and where they snagged. A useful pattern is to read the guide once for orientation, try one of the linked worksheets for a week, then come back and re-read with the lived experience as context. The second pass usually lands very differently from the first.
Pace matters more than intensity. The clinicians who get the best long-term outcomes with these techniques are the ones who help clients build a small, sustainable practice rather than a heroic short burst. The same applies to self-guided work. Twenty minutes a day, four or five days a week, for a couple of months, will move you further than a weekend marathon and a month of nothing. If you find yourself avoiding the work, that avoidance is itself useful information — usually about the size of the step, not about your motivation.
Track what you do. A simple log of which exercises you tried, when, and what you noticed afterwards is one of the most predictive markers of progress in self-help research. The act of writing it down both reinforces the practice and gives you something concrete to bring to a clinician later if you decide to seek support.
When to bring this work to a professional
Self-help materials, including the worksheets and guides on this site, are an evidence-supported starting point for mild-to-moderate difficulties. They are not a substitute for professional assessment, especially when symptoms are severe, persistent, or paired with safety concerns. The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health and SAMHSA both recommend bringing concerns to a primary-care provider as a first step if specialty mental-health care is hard to access. SAMHSA's national helpline (1-800-662-4357) is free, confidential, and available twenty-four hours a day.
If you are experiencing thoughts of suicide or self-harm, please reach out immediately. In the U.S., call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Outside the U.S., your local emergency number or a crisis line specific to your country can connect you to immediate support. Reaching out is not an overreaction; it is the move with the best evidence behind it.
References & further reading
Related worksheets
Safety Plan Template
A printable Stanley-Brown safety plan template — warning signs, internal coping, distractions, supports, professionals, lethal-means safety.
Suicide Crisis Coping Card
A wallet-sized printable card with your specific coping steps, emergency contacts, and reasons for living.
Reasons for Living Inventory
A reflection worksheet for itemizing the things that make staying worth it on hard days.
Crisis Box Inventory
A planning worksheet for assembling a physical or digital "crisis box" — items, scripts, contacts, distractions.