About the approach
What is Alternatives to Suicide?
Alternatives to Suicide is a peer-led approach for people who experience suicidal thoughts, self-harm, or a desire to escape life. It centers connection, curiosity, and shared humanity rather than diagnosis, risk management, or coercion.
While each group is independently run, the Denver Metro groups are rooted in the values described in the Wildflower Alliance Alternatives to Suicide Group Charter. Read the Wildflower Alliance Alternatives to Suicide Group Charter.
What makes Alt2Su different
Many people have been harmed when they tried to talk honestly about suicidal thoughts, including through forced hospitalization, police involvement, loss of autonomy, or being treated as a problem to be managed. Pain can also be connected to isolation, disconnection, discrimination, violence, injustice, and other real life experiences.
Alt2Su groups are intentionally different. They are spaces where people can speak openly about suicidal thoughts and urges without fear, and where those experiences are understood as meaningful responses to pain and life experience, not automatically as symptoms of mental illness.
- We do not call police, crisis services, family members, or other outside entities about what is shared in group, except in the case of an act or direct threat of violence to someone in the group
- No clinical assessment, diagnosis, or treatment plan
- No pressure to get better, be positive, or want to live
- Facilitators are peers with lived experience, not clinicians
- Everyone is invited to use their own words for their own life
What the group is like
This is not a group where everyone is required to check in or speak. You are welcome to share what is coming up for you, ask questions, explore meaning together, speak without wanting feedback, or sit quietly and be present. Silence and witnessing are valid ways to participate.
Conversation is guided by curiosity and respect. Participants often ask questions of one another, not to fix or advise, but to understand more deeply and build connection. The responsibility is to one another, not for or over one another.
Names and pronouns are shared at the start of group, along with access needs. You may use different names or pronouns here than you do elsewhere in your life.
Groups value privacy. A helpful practice is to leave the names and take the lessons, so people can carry what mattered without exposing one another outside the room.
Who groups are for
Alt2Su groups are for people who:
- Experience suicidal thoughts, urges, or fantasies
- Feel worn down by traditional crisis or mental health systems
- Want a space that honors autonomy, consent, and lived experience
- Are looking for connection without pressure to perform wellness
You do not need to be in immediate crisis to attend. You do not need to know what you want or need. Attendance is voluntary and self-determined.
Groups are for people attending for their own support. They are not for observers, media, students, providers, or people attending only to study or evaluate the group.
Group values
- Consent and autonomy
- Curiosity over correction
- Responsibility to one another, not for or over one another
- Connection rather than fear, fixing, judgment, or control
- Choice and self-determination
- Honoring lived experience
What groups are not
- Not therapy
- Not a skills group
- Not a crisis hotline
- Not a place where anyone will tell you what to do