Rusty Ford is a retired pastor and church planter. Rusty’s interest in working with those who struggle with mental health issues began over 20 years ago. After his second major battle with cancer, he was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. He has since published three books on mental health and has two to be released in 2022.
After his sister ended her life in 2016, he has spent his life working to help prevent suicide. He has specialized for the last three years in working with churches to learn how to help prevent suicide and minister to those affected by suicide. He also works with churches in developing ministry to those suffering from depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions.
After leading suicide intervention training through other organizations for the last few years, Rusty developed his own program for training Churches in suicide intervention and prevention. One of the reasons for this is all other programs concentrate on suicide intervention. Suicide intervention is helping someone through an emotional crisis and is thinking about ending their life now. While this is still part of his training, he developed a training program that has a major focus on how to help people before they become suicidal. The result was the seminar and book, “Suicide Prevention and Intervention for Churches.” Unlike other training programs that give you a short 4 to 8-page booklet to go along with the training. The book that goes along with the class includes the entire training program.
Since coming out with the book, Rusty now concentrates much of his time on training others to use the material to train others in their churches.