The Adolescent Safety and Coping Plan (ASCP) is a safety planning intervention designed for adolescents at risk for suicide and their families. The ASCP is a brief intervention designed for adolescents returning home from hospital level of care (but can be used at any level of care) that begins by explaining that in this session the adolescent and parent(s) will work together with the clinician to create a plan to keep the adolescent safe, encourage healthy coping, and increase parent-child communication upon return home from the hospital. The session contains three parts: 1) therapist meeting with the adolescent alone and developing the adolescents plan to keep them safe in a crisis, 2) therapist meeting with the parent(s) alone and developing the parent(s) plan to keep the adolescent safe in a crisis, and 3) therapist meeting with the adolescent and parent(s) together to review the two safety plans (and safety scale) and discuss a plan for when and how to they will use them together, as well as barriers and facilitators that might get in the way of using the safety plans.

The citation for the ASCP is below which describes the intervention and provides an example as well as the manual and safety plan templates.

O’Brien, K., Almeida, J., View, L., Schofield, M., Hall, W., Aguinaldo, L.D., Ryan, C.A., & Maneta, E. (2019). A safety and coping planning intervention for suicidal adolescents in acute psychiatric care. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice.

Parents: The ASCP is designed as an intervention to be conducted together with a clinician - if your child has an outpatient therapist, you can do it together with the therapist. If your child does not have an outpatient therapist you can complete this together with your child by following the instructions in the manual to complete the safety plan templates. You can guide them through the “Adolescent Alone” section first, then complete the “Parent Alone” section on your own, then regroup to complete the safety planning process with the “Adolescent and Parent Together” section.