Crisis templates — safety planning and reasons for living

Two templates sit here, and they do opposite jobs. One is a screen you score. The other is a document you build with the client and they keep. Neither assesses risk on its own. If you are trying to establish whether risk is present, the screening instruments do that — C-SSRS as the structured interview, ASQ as a brief screen, and the PHQ-9’s Item 9 as the flag that most often raises the question in the first place.

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The safety plan is not a form to complete

The safety plan is Stanley and Brown’s six steps — warning signs, internal coping, social distraction, people to call, professionals, and making the environment safer. Its value is in the making of it, collaboratively, in the client’s own words. A safety plan filled in for a client is paperwork; one built with them is an intervention. It ends up in their hands, not only in your record. That is the point of it.

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Reasons for living is a measure, and reads the other way round

The RFL-12 inventories protective factors across four subscales, scored 12–72, where higher is better — the opposite direction to almost everything else in the library. It is a useful counterweight in a session that has spent most of its time on risk, and it gives you something to track that is not deterioration.

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What Rivet does and does not do here

Rivet flags a positive PHQ-9 Item 9 and timestamps when the response arrived, and it holds the safety plan against the client’s record so it is findable in the next session rather than in a drawer. Everything after that is clinical judgement — what a positive screen means for this client, what to do next, who to involve, and what your College expects you to document. The software’s job is to put the information in front of you and keep it, not to decide.

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The two templates

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