Time Space Compassion - supporting people experiencing suicidal crisis: stories in practice - volume 1

4. The Lighthouse Perth

Making space to shape safety plans with children & young people by being accessible, being alongside and supporting safety

The Lighthouse offers crisis support to young people aged 12 and over. This includes those who are at risk of suicide or self-injury, or those who find themselves in emotional distress or crisis.

"By centring everything we do around the young people we support, they have built their confidence and trust in us, and that we are doing everything for their safety/benefit. We've gone from 50 to 60% of young people agreeing for us to share their safety plan with key people at their school, to over 95%. This is really important in allowing us to form a bigger safety network around them."

4.1 Our challenge

We offer crisis support for young people in Perth and Kinross and regularly support young people and families impacted by self-harm and suicidal ideation. We had started to notice a trend in comments and some resistance to our safety plans from young people using our service.

4.2 Our response

We asked every young person using our crisis service what they thought about our safety plan - did they like it, did they feel comfortable completing this and using it as a safety tool in their recovery? We captured feedback anonymously to ensure confidentiality and encourage an open response. We discovered that young people attending for reasons of self-harm did not like how the safety plan made reference to both self-harm and suicide – they were clear that, while self-harm and suicide can be linked, self-harming didn't always mean they were suicidal. We've now developed two safety-plans to reflect this.

4.3 Learning from practice

Being accessible – creating the space for young people to tell us about their experience of what we do is important – talking openly about challenges, giving them control over what impacts on them, working through it together, and sharing back how their input has impacted positively for others. Being alongside – listening and letting people know their voice is being heard, is critical. No two young people are the same, their experiences are different and what works and matters to them differs from person to person. By listening to them collectively you get a clear picture of what it is they need, what works best for them and, importantly, they feel like they matter. Supporting safety – the value to our young people has been priceless, they feel listened to, like they have contributed to our service and they now have a document they are happy to use, meaning they are more likely to use it to keep themselves safe.

4.4 Impact

Our two model safety planning is now fully implemented. The evidence is clear in the amount of young people who now agree to having a safety plan completed as part of their support at Lighthouse – everyone now sees it as a positive tool in their journey and we have seen evidence of this being applied when crisis situations arise. We've gone from 50 to 60% of young people agreeing for us to share their safety plan with people at their school, to over 95%.

Find out more and contact the Lighthouse team through their website