Meeting Youth Where They Live: How to Use a QR Code in Safety Planning

When in extreme distress, it is difficult to remember the coping strategies and resources available to you. The purpose of a safety plan is to make it easier for individuals to make wise choices in moments of crisis. By virtue of this, we should strive to have safety plans as easy and convenient to use as possible. The Stanley-Brown safety plan is a template for this style of intervention and has been adapted and adopted in numerous institutions.¹ A pillar of this intervention is ready-at-hand contact information for mental health agencies and crisis resources. Although the classic paper safety plan remains an invaluable tool, integration of digital resources may be necessary to meet our young patients "where they live."² Generation Z are "digital natives" with great fluency and comfort with smart devices. Expansion of the audio-only National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to the audio, SMS, and Web-based instant messaging capabilities of the 988 Crisis & Suicide Lifeline recognizes this shift.³ At the University of Michigan, we developed a quick response (QR) code to save these resources directly onto youths' smartphones.