We started off as Singapore's 1st Safe Space Intervention for individuals in suicidal distress on 1st November 2023. We were the first mental health group to roll out a community-based virtual peer support buddy programme in March 2024 to better support people with mental health issues in light of changes to the Mental Health (Care and Treatment) Act.

This was expanded in April 2024 to include an on-demand advisory sevice for family and friends to receive help on how to support those in need. The expansion also saw the creation of Vent Buddies, a temporary facilitated support group focused on validation and healthy communication of suicidal thoughts and feelings while encouraging beneficial emotional release. This is to counter misinformation from online forums/chat groups and prevent misdirection of suicidal tensions. 

Following the successful conclusion of these earlier time-limited programmes, we started to delve deeper into mental health education. On 27 April 2024, we officially adopted the tomato emoji 🍅 as our universal help-seeking communication tool for persons in need and their family/friends. This is the first such attempt in Singapore and the Asian region to promote the widespread use of a visual symbol to fill in emotional cues so that the initiation of mental help-seeking behaviour becomes easier for all.

 This was followed by the introduction of the Safe U 3-Step Acupressure Emotional First Aid for Psychache on 2 May 2024. It is meant to complement distress tolerance skills in emotional crises but can also be useful in stressful situations on a daily basis. Utilising principles from Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), we were able to implement a simple three step acupoint stimulation method to regulate one's emotions within minutes. Since it is very easy to learn, it can be used both as a self-help tool and also administered to someone in distress. This is also the ony incorporation of TCM emotional regulatory principles in a mental health initiative in Singapore.

On 6 May 2024, we launched the Safe U Barrier-Focused Suicide Prevention Procedure . This is a suicide prevention method based on our original concept of establishing successive physical and psychological barriers to prevent the escalation of suicidal behaviour. The main focus is on suicide prevention by the individual and his/her family and friends as we believe that the most proximal form of prevention can have the greatest effectiveness. To allow individuals with suicidal distress and/or high risk of self-harm increased perceived control, we also introduced Safe U's self-developed 3 rubber band method © as part of our procedure. Instead of being a form of substitution, the rubber band forms a visible reminder and personal agreement to keep safe, encourage compassionate self-protective behaviours and signal varying levels of distress to safeguarders. 

We embarked on The SMILE Project on 11 May 2024. This is our side project to collect smiles from the public and create a series which will be presented to anyone who needs a smile in times of sadness and loneliness. It is a meaningful and mutually beneficial project as both sides can experience the joy of smiling and its health effects. A smile from a stranger can mean the world to a person struggling to find happiness each day. 

Following which, we introduced our Safe U Single-Session Transdiagnostic Workshop for Emotional Regulation on 22 May 2024. This is a combination of Single-Session Intervention and Transdiagnostic Care which are evidence based approaches shown to alleviate general distress, depression and emotional dysregulation. This is also the first of its kind in Singapore. We continue to emphasise on seeing individuals as persons rather than specific diagnoses as well as providing early cost-effective mental health intervention to mitigate the problems of long waiting times and expensive professional services.

We transitioned into a bilingual and bicultural mental health and suicide support service on 25 May 2024, making us one of very few mental health organisations in Singapore capable of delivering culturally sensitive services in both English and Mandarin. Our unique model of care is formally known as the Sociocultural Dissuation Model (SDM).

In line with this transition, our official Chinese name is 星洲守护心灵企划. It represents our wish to safeguard the “hearts and souls” of every Singaporean and functions as a constant reminder to ourselves to rediscover the past so that we can bring about change in the future.

On 21 June 2024, we completed our Safe U Approach to Emotional Regulation & Maintenance. This is a comprehensive but accessible guide for any person who has difficulty coping with negative emotions. We simplified our approach in terms of numbers and letters of the alphabet so that everyone can remember. Need regulation? Try our ABC and 123 approach. Need to maintain? Use the DEF and Standardised Finger-Grip methods. Regulatory skills have never been easier to learn.

Following which, we launched Singapore's 1st emotional support plushie in collaboration with Plush Plush SG on 27th June 2024. This is a customised and specially curated Panda Teddy plushie which is imbued with different emotional meanings and meant to function as a transitional object for both kids and adults. This is line with a focus on self-soothing and rediscovering emotional links to happy memories as a source of strength and comfort.

On 30th June 2024, our second workshop was created. The Safe U Suicide & Mental Distress Gatekeeper (SMDG) Workshop is aimed at training gatekeepers for the community who can not only deal with suicidal cases but also individuals in mental distress. This is different from the usual approach of just focusing on suicide gatekeeping. We wish to increase the capability of gatekeepers to deal with a broader ranger of mental health situations so that their skills become more relevant and useful to community needs.

We pushed on and introduced our workshops on Transitional Objects & Emotional Security (TOES) on 6 July 2024 and Coping with Transitions (CTW) on 24 July 2024. These workshops are aimed helping individuals adapt and cope with transitions between life phases from childhood, adolescence to adulthood. We focus on utilising transitional phenomena as an adjunt therapeutic tool to the four steps of Schlossberg's Transition Theory.

On 15th August, we launched Singapore's 1st and only Death Experience Workshop. This is part of our Suicide Resilience Experiential Project (SREP), which is our major project of 2024. Why Death Experience? You can only appreciate life to the fullest when you understand death. Whether it is just thoughts of death, experiencing threats to life or the loss of someone close to you, they are some of the most important lessons you can get in life. Our SREP also included the introduction of Singapore's only Self-Harm Prevention & Risk Minimisation (SPRM) Workshop focusing solely on self-harm as well as workshops targeting depression and advanced suicide gatekeeping.

On 13 September 2024, we introduced a six week informal Chinese psychoeducation programme《懂庄子，懂人生》. This is our way of promoting Chinese culture and incorporating ancient Chinese wisdom and philosophy into the mental health of each and every Singaporean. Zhuang Zi's philosophy can be found in areas of modern psychology as diverse as humanistic psychology (focusing on self-actualisation), transpersonal psychology (interconnectedness of mind, body and spirit as well as cognitive flexibility and positive psychology.

On 9 October 2024, we officially expanded our Suicide Resilience Experiential Project (SREP) into the full fledged Life & Death Education (LDE) programme. This decision follows the success of our Death Experience Workshop. Unlike the concept of Death Cafes, we do not focus solely on normalising conversations around death and dying, we adhere to the concepts of ‘letting death show you the way to live’ and 'approaching life from the perspective of death'. The LDE programme complements our mental health and suicide intervention efforts by dealing explicitly with the fundamental question: If life is finite and death is imminent, how do we lead a meaningful and purposeful life?

With the successful implementation of the LDE programme, we have fully constructed our three main focus areas of mental health, suicide intervention and life & death education by November 2024. These focus areas provide a highly original and comprehensive conceptual framework which stretches the limits of how mental health and suicide support are currently provided in Singapore and most parts of Asia.

Our commitment to early upstream intervention is illustrated by the creation of the Safe U Self-Harm Mitigation Service on 21st December 2024. It was rolled out in stages throughout 2025. This is the only full-scale intervention programme dedicated to self-harm in Singapore. Our SPRM workshop provided an opportunity for us to pilot several critical ideas which gave rise to a comprehensive programme targeting each and every checkpoint in an individual struggling with self-harm tendencies. The Safe U Self-Harm Mitigation Service also feeds directly into the Safe U Suicide Intervention Programme (SAFE UP) and broadly overlaps with all three focus areas.

As we moved into 2025, we continued to expand and layer each focus area to increase inclusiveness and extensiveness. You may have noticed that we have a few other specially curated programmes covering the preventive, acute and recovery phases of suicide support. These programmes will undergo an intensive evaluation phase to ensure evidence-based implementation. We will continue to do our best to establish ourselves as a centre of excellence for mental health and suicide support in Singapore.

On 4th Jan 2025, we successfully completed our community outreach project in collaboration with the National Council Against Drug Abuse (NCADA) to initiate behavioural change against drug abuse. This is a multi-session project in which we worked with members of the public on a 1-1 basis to promote lifestyle change while learning about anti-drug messages.

On 13th Jan 2025, we introduced the BECA strategy which targets early to immediate suicide-related decision making. BECA stands for Behavioural Economics for Cognitive Biases under Affective Forecasting.

The strategy promotes our principles of accessibility, responsibility and destigmatisation and permeates throughout all our interventions. The significance of the BECA strategy lies in not only providing suicide intervention options for individuals in need but also actively guiding them to make rational decisions for themselves during peri-suicidal situations. The preservation of personal autonomy is tantamount in this strategy and contributes significantly the creation of a Safe Space and the reduction of involuntary admissions.

On 18th Jan 2025, we conducted Safe U's Psychological First Aid (PFA) Workshop for tertiary students at the National University of Singapore (NUS). This is a pro bono collaboration with Project First Aid, which is a NUS student group providing Nursing students with the opportunity to learn first aid, as well as practice their skills on conducting health education to others. This PFA workshop is now available to other educational institutions and workplaces.

Following which, we introduced our suicide risk evaluation model (ASM) on 8th Feb 2025. ASM is the acronym for our newly created Aleatoric Suicidal Moments model and is meant to address the limitations of risk stratification adopted in existing healthcare settings. The ASM is highly holistic and acknowledges the individual's innate resilience against suicidal tendencies. The ASM may be combined with BECA (BECA-ASM), as necessary, for all our programmes. It is our wish that the ASM will become the gold standard for suicide risk evaluation in Singapore.

On 22nd Feb 2025, we piloted two community special purpose teams to evaluate the feasiblity of SAFE UP in mobile settings. The Suicide Intervention (SI) and Self Harm-Mental Health (SH-MH) teams consisted of volunteers who are effectively bilingual and highly skilled to avert mental health and suicidal crises.

With the advent of our community special purpose teams, we simultaneously evaluated the use of our O/PRA Gating Procedure since 2nd March 2025. O/PRA relates to a set of multiple steps which we adopt to objectively and phenomenologically alleviate near-suicide risk, which is the most proximal element in suicidal progression. Rather than focusing on static risk factors which offer baseline risk assessment, O/PRA targets where it matters most- the immediate steps before a suicide. The community teams and O/PRA provided valuable data that refined SAFE UP and inspired the next slate of intervention services.

We embarked on a campaign of free public workshops throughout 2025 which included our Psychological First Aid (PFA) workshop, Emotional Regulation Skills (ERS), Uncertainty Tolerance Skills (UTS), Basic Suicide Gatekeeper (BSG) -> 101 for laypersons, Suicide & Mental Distress Gatekeeper (SMDG) -> for VWOs & intermediate training and Self-Harm Awareness & Prevention (SHAP) workshops. These workshops were designed with a new bilingual curriculum specially created for small compact classes in community settings. The aim of our campaign is to promote public mental health and self-harm/suicide awareness and encourage more people to pay it forward by using these skills to help others in need. Importantly, it is our small way of saying thank you to those who have journeyed with us. We are here because of you.

On 16th June 2025, we announced the companion piece to our signature Death Experience workshop. Journey through the underworld (冥道) expands our LDE work through a bicultural experiential workshop which explores themes intersecting life and death as well as life after death. Far from encouraging any particular religious or supertitious beliefs, 冥道 provides an in-depth psychocultural exploration of what it means to thread between life and darkness, pain and healing, suffering and renewal.

From June to November 2025, we successfully piloted a free clinical hypnotherapy based programme for individuals with selected mental health problems such as anxiety, depression and trauma (i.e., known risk factors for suicidality). It is gentle, human-centred and responsive to subtle emotional shifts even before distress becomes noticeable.

One unique characteristic of this intervention is a psychotherapeutic model based on progressive chaining to facilitate gradual and sustainable change. The programme also incorporates a multi-foci approach which serves to 1) achieve symptomatic relief, 2) address underlying triggers and 3) prevent progression to self-destructive behaviour such as self-harm and suicide. Additionally, this approach helps beneficaries to reduce the probability of relapse. On 19 Jan 2026, this programme has been formally named as First Light 初光 and is ready for public rollout. 

Since March 2026, we have reorganised our Intervention Services to 1) mirror the growth in our initiative's expertise and programme effectiveness beyond suicide intervention and 2) to provide seamless transition between our three focus areas. These services include: 

Mental Health Advisory & Support
Suicide Intervention Programmes 
Self-Harm Mitigation Service
Life & Death Education
Post-Suicidal Recovery Programmes

This reorganisation led to the introduction of our 2026 flagship programmes such as S.I.R.EN (suicide ideation), PCS (post-crisis support), Open Dialogue and MINCP (recurrent suicidality).

Through our determination and innovation, we aim to alleviate psychological suffering and provide a safe space where dignity is allowed to flourish.

AD MENTIS LEVAMEN · AD DIGNITATIS CULTUM

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