How do contingency plans, safety planning and family support plans fit together?

Questions & Responses

How do Contingency Plans, Safety Planning, and Family Support Plans fit together?  

  • Contingency plans address an identified foreseeable change. Creating a contingency plan for each of the two identified foreseeable changes and addressing access to lethal means is a solid initial response to risk. 
  • Safety plans contain additional specific strategies that address factors like warning signs, coping skills, crisis response resources, and connecting with natural supports. Stanley and Brown (2012) Safety Planning Intervention is one example, but there are others available as well. Some organizations also integrate wellness, transition, and recovery into safety plans - all great ways to integrate More than Safety into planning!
  • Family support plans are the specific actions that family or support people can take to support contingency and safety plans; these are developed collaboratively with the person and their family/natural supports. 

Tony highlighted the Youth-Nominated Support Team - Version II (YST-II; King, Klaus, Kramer, Venkataraman, Quinlan, et al. 2009; King, Arango, Kramer, Bushby, Czyz et al., 2019) as an example of a manualized social support intervention for adolescents where youth nominate adults and those adults are provided specific, actionable training in how to support the adolescent in their recovery. 

Integrating Peer Supports: Peer support/lived experience professionals can have an important role in plans. All team members, including peer support, need clear responsibilities and roles and that the boundaries of those roles should be clear for everyone on the team.