Thrive Methodology™

Why 'Thrive' rather than traditional suicide prevention?

There is more focus on suicide prevention than ever before, and yet we continue to lose those we love at an incomprehensible rate. In the US alone, more than 50,000 lives were lost to suicide in 2023, more than any year on record. It's a rate that isn’t so different from the HIV epidemic in the late 1900s, or the rate of lives lost to car accidents in the 1930s.

The three crises produced three solutions: sex education, driver’s education and suicide prevention. Each were created to save lives, but only the first two have been profoundly successful due to one very critical difference in how they were formed.

Both sex education and driver’s education, as named, focus on the solution; teaching how to safely do each activity. We do not call them car accident prevention or HIV/pregnancy prevention.

This positive focus has evolved sex education and driver’s education over the years, and they continue to explore and share new ways of experiencing safety with modern tools and resources.

Meanwhile, suicide prevention, as named, focuses on the very thing we want to stop rather than what we actually wish to experience. While it may seem trivial, this matters because we create what we fixate on, even when we’re trying to prevent the very thing we’re fixated on.

As a result, suicide prevention has gone unchanged for over 25 years. It’s still focused on stopping suicide in the moment of crisis, not realizing that the most effective way to reduce the risk of suicide is by teaching how to safely and effectively live.

Or, in other words, how to thrive.

It isn’t enough to simply save a life if they do not see any reason to live. It is time that we stop focusing on preventing suicide in the moment of crisis and we start empowering people with the tools and resources that will help them navigate challenges and remain focused on living a life they love.

The Thrive Methodology is a comprehensive six-pillar approach to understanding the suicidal to thriving spectrum. The focus, as it always should have been, is discovering what it means to thrive with an awareness of what it means to be suicidal, and how to safely and effectively navigate each.

Thrive has rewritten the suicide prevention handbook, and the differences compared to current solutions are drastically clear:

Thrive helps you grow from helpless and scared to empowered and prepared. It provides a clear understanding of what causes suicide, how to talk about it, and how to navigate it.

Furthermore, removing the fear and uncertainty improves our ability to make conscious and informed decisions while recognizing that the risk of suicide, just like any other health condition, can be managed, reduced and potentially eliminated with the proper support for our physical, mental and emotional health.

Welcome to the Thrive Methodology, one that provides the tools and resources needed to go beyond simply surviving to thriving.