How to Write a Safety Plan
A practical walkthrough of the Stanley-Brown Safety Plan for moments of suicidal crisis.
What a safety plan is
The Stanley-Brown Safety Plan is the most widely used clinical tool for working with suicidal crises. It is a single-page written plan, completed in advance with a clinician or trusted helper, that lists the early warning signs of a crisis and a graded series of moves you can make as the crisis intensifies. SAMHSA and the U.S. Veterans Affairs system both endorse safety planning as a core element of suicide prevention.
If you are in immediate crisis, please call or text 988 (the U.S. Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) or your local emergency number. The plan below is a tool for the long haul, not a substitute for emergency contact.
The six steps
1. Warning signs — the thoughts, feelings, situations, and behaviors that tell you a crisis is coming. 2. Internal coping strategies — things you can do alone to lower distress (a walk, a shower, a specific song). 3. People and social settings that provide distraction — names of friends to text, places to go that change your environment without requiring conversation about the crisis.
4. People you can ask for help — explicit names and phone numbers. 5. Professionals and agencies you can contact — your therapist, prescriber, the 988 lifeline, the local crisis team. 6. Lethal-means safety — the specific steps you have agreed to take to make the most dangerous methods less accessible during high-risk windows.
Where to keep it
A safety plan that lives in a folder is much less useful than one in your wallet, on your phone's lock screen, on the fridge, and shared with one trusted person. Most people find that keeping it in two or three places makes it actually accessible during a crisis when memory and decision-making are compromised.
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 Write a Safety Plan 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.