A while ago I was seriously sick + in a hospital (for a few months). The doctors told me that I won't be able to resume my regular job (software engineer). At the same time I was in a lot of pain – unable to sit, walk, stand. It was not really clear how it all would end.
I got deeply depressed and just wanted to die. The pain was just too much - even with controlled pain medication in a hospital setup.
I called the German crisis hotline almost every night and they were usually very very helpful. They listened - sometimes for 1-2 hours. In 90% of my calls I felt way better after calling them. They really are well trained and some of the personalities I talked to were pretty impressive and interesting… They have seen a lot…
I don’t see how. Have you ever tried calling one of these lines in a suicide emergency? Things I’ve learned in California:
- an ambulance will not be dispatched unless you physically witness someone trying to kill themselves
- otherwise, they send the police
- the police arrive without training and severely escalate the situation
- the person having an emergency will be taken into custody and stripped of rights until being medically evaluated (not arrested)
This is the program of an allegedly progressive state. After 2 experiences like this, adding trauma to already traumatic situations, I would never recommend these hotlines.
These hotlines are for providing support. They are trained not to escalate to sending someone unless they absolutely deem it necessary (and the caller agrees). My wife has been working the hotline as a volunteer for 6 years and has not once escalated to sending someone.
As others noted, my California county has a dedicated team to respond to this.
A fact I've noticed is that suicide rates are higher in areas with lower population density. For example, Alaska's suicide rate is 4x what New York's rate is.
Perhaps just human connection, even momentarily, is enough to break the pattern of behavior that has lead to the ideation.
Also worth noting that suicide rates among the elderly are higher than they are for anyone other than teens. If you have someone you love that doesn't get out much, make sure you give them a call now and again.
If you take a chart of population density, and overlay the chart of suicide rate, you'll see an exceedingly strong correlation. It does not follow weather patterns. Utah has 3x the problem relative to California, for example.
> how we try to prevent people from shooting themselves by sending people with guns to help them
People with guns are still people. Having anyone there will reduce harm in more cases than it escalates. Suicide is usually an impulse a lonely person who is otherwise perfectly sane carries out in the absence of intervention.
Replace the phrase "people with guns" with "institutional violence" because that's what the police are. When police are called to the scene, the intention of the caller is violence, not to help. If the intention was help, then actual helpers would be called instead.
Armed cops actively escalating the situation will help someone suicidal?
The cops in my country do work that is not about catching criminals, like leading search and rescure operations. Apparently not a problem. Apparently now these particular police have started carrying weapons as a matter of course. So that’s a bad development for a regular, peaceful presence. But overall we seem okay with the regime.
So I don’t have some personal feeling that violence is about to erupt because the police are nearby.
But I don’t see how this helps for those particular locales where the population (or segments of it) only associate active police involvement with escalation.
> Having anyone there will reduce harm in more cases than it escalates
That was never the point I was arguing against. I was arguing against which people are there.
> Suicide is usually an impulse a lonely person who is otherwise perfectly sane carries out in the absence of intervention.
I do not believe that in the slightest. There is an array of causes from physical illnesses, mental illnesses, spiritual beliefs, political beliefs, to even cultural beliefs. Sure, loneliness can contribute in some cases, but it does not hold a candle to conditions like mood disorders, psychotic disorders, substance abuse, etc..
They're crisis services, not emergency services. Anyone who is an immediate danger to themselves or others needs to be attended to by the first available emergency services. The attending services should be trained to deescalate, definitely, but I don't think this is an indictment of the crisis lines themselves. Less than 1% of calls to the crisis line result in any sort of emergency service dispatch.
I bet there is so much more we could do to reduce suicides, which are a massively big problem. I wish we paid as much attention to suicide as we do to very rare mass shootings, which kill a tiny fraction of the people.
It's important to remember that the majority of gun deaths are suicides.
It's also important to remember that any blocker between a potential suicide victim and the weapon of choice reduces rates greatly. A gun locked in a safe where the potential suicide knows the code - reduces rates.
> It's also important to remember that any blocker between a potential suicide victim and the weapon of choice reduces rates greatly. A gun locked in a safe where the potential suicide knows the code - reduces rates.
RAND found that minimum age requirements and child-access prevention laws reduced suicides and unintentional injuries/deaths and violent crime:
the data from CDC agrees with you, and agrees that a firearm is most common method.
but also indicates age correlate with freq of suicde by firearm.
guess who the least frequent group is, kids.
now that might fly in the face of stats, but suicide is an "intentional" thing.
[that rides on the idea that you are competent to form intent when suicidal]
so yes if you keep your guns secure, and gun proof your kids to mitigate accidents that should improve things, for kids.
however take at least as much care for your grandparents, they are apparently at extreme risk, of forming intent and, acting especially grandpa.
The point of the second part is that grandpa locking up his gun reduces his risk of suicide. Anything that adds a "checkpoint" that activates even some small other part of the brain seems to help.
yeah you got it, the reasons why it seems to be the better choice are somewhat glum. terminal illness with no quick relief in sight, an estate now the best contribution to be made vs impending medical expenses.
it might work for spur of the moment almost reflex decisions, but its a different story when the choice is made over a few years, reinforced by physical reasons.
> however take at least as much care for your grandparents, they are apparently at extreme risk, of forming intent and, acting especially grandpa.
What if allowing suicide is taking care of one's grandparents? After all, if I was diagnosed with a awful condition like Alzheimer's, ALS, etc.. I am absolutely going out that way once I start having more bad days than good days.
Interesting. What causes this? Could it have to do with the type of person to keep a gun in a safe (has kids, is more cautious in general, etc) or have studies shown that this minor friction is actually enough?
That was the general conclusion as I recall it. Originally it was thought to be "someone else has the key" kind of things - which of course, does limit it - but even controlling for "I have to walk downstairs and find the key" reduces it.
the Israeli military did a study about ~15 years ago where they looked at soldier suicide rates after they had enacted a policy of leaving the weapons at base over the weekend and if I recall correctly it cut the rate of suicides by 40-50%.
And on the flip side, the US Sec Def recently allowed US soldiers to carry loaded weapons on base (when not in a role that required it, which was previously disallowed). I expect this will increase suicides on US military bases. All for some "rah rah, 2A, mah rights!!!" bullshit political posturing.
The US Veteran's Affairs agency makes a free app to help with insomnia; it has all the usual advice that would apply to anyone - plus advising veterans not to keep a loaded gun by the bed, even if it makes them feel safer going to sleep.
this is a really weird comparison to make given that the US has basically made no material progress on policy that could prevent mass shootings.
they're both really really bad things. they both deserve as much attention as we can afford (which is more than they get).
not to just jump down your throat -- i agree with you about more needing to be done to prevent suicides though. i think it's a good thing that hotlines are available but it's clear that putting the onus on people who are considering suicide to reach out for help is not enough. we gotta get better at reaching out and checking on our friends, loved ones, coworkers etc and help them carry the load more than we're culturally accustomed to.
are you asking me, a numbskull with an associate's degree, to propose public policy*? i think we're allowed to want qualified people to do better in the positions we've elected them to :)
* if so, my policy is that all guns be vaporized overnight. also, my policy would include the end of lobbying entirely, including but not limited to the small arms industry and the NRA along with police guilds and other organizations supporting the small arms race in this country
It doesn't have to be a competition, and similar things, like making it harder to get a gun, introducing/enforcing laws around locking up your weapon, making mental healthcare more available (including a hotline), etc., will greatly reduce both.
> I bet there is so much more we could do to reduce suicides
I am absolutely certain that is the case, however, society operates with such demands from individuals that a majority of necessary changes would be adamantly fought against by those which stand to benefit from the suffering.
Having been through the whole mental health treatment gamut in the USA, I am convinced the only goal of the system is to patch people up just enough that they can be churned back into the capitalist machine. What makes things even sicker, is that one's health insurance is often tied to their employment, so in order to receive basically any treatment, one is typically required to be employed and working.
Yeah when you redefine the term to be "active shooter" I guess, something tells me that the American public still doesn't want to die in a mass shooting:
It's a sick society when you have one for nearly every single day of the year. But hey this is the result of neoliberal economics so why should we get too upset at the societal rot when corporatists are increasing shareholder value?
One sad fact I learned about adolescent suicide (12 to 18 years of age) is that it's seasonal. It picks up during the school year and drops precipitously during summer and winter vacations.
Being in school has a profound impact on whether or not a child wants to kill themselves.
Something I read recently really stuck with me: giving people methylphenidate or other stimulants may lower the risk of a second suicide attempt by around 25%.
It's good to celebrate this... but, looking forward, it's worrying to think whether kiddos these days are going first to ChatGPT instead, of, well, the hotline (or real people!) I think there's genuine value in going to an AI -- as long as you think of it as "interactive journaling", and not a human relationship. But, will they encourage struggling kiddos to make the leap and ask for support from an actual person?
What's it going to do, help them avoid passive voice in their suicide note? Encourage them to carry it out? Hype them up about suicide? Tell them they're absolutely correct?
> The Trump administration on Thursday afternoon officially terminated the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ Youth Specialized Services program, which gave callers under age 25 the option to speak with LGBTQ-trained counselors.
I'm sorry, but I beg to differ here. LGBTQ are people too. There's nothing unique that requires "training" to handle their cases any more than Black or Asian or Indian cases. There doesn't need to be a specialist for every group, or worse - some groups.
A national hotline that can handle anyone is clearly the right way.
Trying to engage in good faith: would you likewise say that the notion of sports medicine is irrelevant? That even though professional athletes have unique stresses on parts of their bodies that are not common in a general population, unique levels of societal pressure around accelerating their recovery time, and a need for rapid real-time diagnostics... a generalist physician would be as effective as a specialist?
Now imagine you're running a massive sports team, and you have a budget for medical care. But then a government entity comes and says: regardless of outcomes, you're not allowed to hire specialists or allow your team members to elect to go to specialists, because that could be seen as unfair... regardless of whether statistics point to improved outcomes if you were allowed to have certain specialists.
Looping back to suicide hotlines: even if the administration had increased funding to the hotline to compensate for the ended specialist program (which is highly unlikely, and that this was more likely a net funding loss) - it's a similar restriction on whether a lifeline program can allocate resources to specialists. And the stakes here couldn't be higher.
(And if statistics pointed to other groups benefiting similarly from specialization, I’d want a clinician-led organization to evaluate that research and determine budget allocation towards those specialists, too.)
> A national hotline that can handle anyone is clearly the right way
The data suggest otherwise [1].
Which makes sense. “For LGBTQ youth, risk factors such as bullying, abuse, negative family treatment, as well as negative emotions caused by anti-LGBTQ legislation have also been identified” [2]. If you’re in a community that’s tolerating all of that, your trust in generic institutions will be low.
> any more than Black or Asian or Indian cases
If a population is disproportionately committing suicide, they should be disproportionately resourced. “Native Americans and non-Hispanic White Americans” have “the highest suicide rate in the United States” [3].
Different people face different challenges, and helping them requires different strategies. You really don't think that there's anything unique about the challenges LGBTQ people face?
What is this assumption based on? It sounds political.
Are LGBTQ people at a higher risk for suicide? Could hotline staff reduce suicide attempts with special training? Seems like you could measure this.
Thinking about other groups with a higher risk--veterans, abuse survivors, gambling addicts--are there suicide prevention programs for these groups and are they effective?
There was actually a study done on this [0] that found LGBTQ youth are around four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their non-LGBTQ peers.
> Thinking about other groups with a higher risk--veterans, abuse survivors, gambling addicts--are there suicide prevention programs for these groups and are they effective?
For veterans in the US, at least, there are specific programs targeting them since they do have a disproportionately high level of suicides and suicide attempts compared to the general population.
> There doesn't need to be a specialist for every group, or worse - some groups.
Why? The struggles different groups generally face are not the same. For a hotline for veterans, wouldn't it make sense to have counselors who are either veterans themselves or have worked extensively with veterans and their specific patterns of issues?
By that logic, pediatricians and gynecologists shouldn't exist.
> A national hotline that can handle anyone is clearly the right way.
Absolutely. That describes this setup. You call the number. You get help. Sometimes that means a person trained in, say, talking to rape victims. (If you go to the ER, they'll have a nurse trained in it too!)
Per the article: "Also known as the 'Press 3 option,' the program gave 988 callers the option to 'press 3' to connect with a counselor trained to assist lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youths and young adults (they could also text 988 with the word 'PRIDE'). Nearly 1.5 million contacts were routed to the LGBTQ service since its launch, according to data available on the SAMHSA website."
Those are physical differences. Which isn’t to say that you’re wrong, but we could easily have different things for physical differences and not for mental differences. Should we have different prisons for gays? Same logic, no?
The leading theories for the biological underpinnings of same-sex attraction are also physical—some combination of genes, prenatal environment, and biochemistry—so this argument fails both ways.
It’s moot in any case because the whole point is identifying groups of people who benefit from help tailored at their situation so it’d make sense to specialize even if it was a choice. If we saw tons football fans more likely to contemplate suicide after the Super Bowl we’d want to support them even though that’s unambiguously social. Helping people is what makes civilization worth having.
Good; we agree differences in a patient/customer may require special training/handling.
> Should we have different prisons for gays?
Again, this wasn't a different hotline. Just a phone tree option.
I suspect prisons, at times, have to manage things specific to gay inmates. Seems like it could cause roommate situations to be accounted for, as an example.
> Incarcerated Individuals can contact OSI directly by dialing 444 from any incarcerated individual phone Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:00 am and 5:00 pm.
> Every jail must develop a clear and responsive prisoner grievance procedure, including a formal means of delivering complaints and concerns from a prisoner to the administration and the procedures by which the prisoner receives a written response. However, the prisoner should not be able to use the procedures to avoid institutional rules and regulations.
Do what you can to support marginalized folks out there. When I do any kind of political / charitable donation, my wife gets to make an equal one to any organization of her choice and often chooses the Trevor project which makes me incredibly proud of her.
Personally I never called any such hotline; my assumption
was that suicidal thoughts originate from one's own brain
and way of thinking - adjust that and these issues would
go away. Unfortunately, while this can work (for me it
worked extremely well, though I should also say, I don't
have suicidal thoughts to begin with, even more so as one's
lifespan is finite anyway - but I do understand those who
have a terminal illness, to not have to go through more
suffering when something is uncurable), there are people
for whom it can not work, often in the way how their
brain works. Just like some people have seizures, brains
are different too.
It puts some responsibility on those who receive such
calls, because the caller may be in a state where any
additional negative input could push that caller over
the edge, due to their current state of mind. So this
kind of requires more training even of casual people,
just as people are expected to know the basic steps
necessary for first aid (on a fresh accident site,
for instance). It seems pretty clear that those on
the national hotline, must have had professional
training too. So if there is a decline of suicides,
this is most likely - and logically - due to the work
by those who take up the phones.
> my assumption was that suicidal thoughts originate from one's own brain and way of thinking - adjust that and these issues would go away. Unfortunately, while this can work (for me it worked extremely well, though I should also say, I don't have suicidal thoughts to begin with
You're, in this comment and the part I quoted, saying that adjusting your thinking worked well for you (with the implication that it worked well in dealing with suicidal thoughts), but you say you don't have the problem (suicidal thoughts or ideation) under discussion. This is like saying, "I've heard that you can walk it off when you break your leg, and that's worked for me, but I've never actually had a broken leg." Complete nonsense.
This is bootstraps by another name. “Just (don’t) do it” belongs in nike commercials, not in discussions surrounding behavioral health. If it were that simple then we wouldn’t have these issues at this scale in the first place.
I got deeply depressed and just wanted to die. The pain was just too much - even with controlled pain medication in a hospital setup.
I called the German crisis hotline almost every night and they were usually very very helpful. They listened - sometimes for 1-2 hours. In 90% of my calls I felt way better after calling them. They really are well trained and some of the personalities I talked to were pretty impressive and interesting… They have seen a lot…
- an ambulance will not be dispatched unless you physically witness someone trying to kill themselves
- otherwise, they send the police
- the police arrive without training and severely escalate the situation
- the person having an emergency will be taken into custody and stripped of rights until being medically evaluated (not arrested)
This is the program of an allegedly progressive state. After 2 experiences like this, adding trauma to already traumatic situations, I would never recommend these hotlines.
None of them resulted in police intervention. Our county has a mobile crisis team of social workers who show up and get you connected to services.
These hotlines are for providing support. They are trained not to escalate to sending someone unless they absolutely deem it necessary (and the caller agrees). My wife has been working the hotline as a volunteer for 6 years and has not once escalated to sending someone.
As others noted, my California county has a dedicated team to respond to this.
Perhaps just human connection, even momentarily, is enough to break the pattern of behavior that has lead to the ideation.
Also worth noting that suicide rates among the elderly are higher than they are for anyone other than teens. If you have someone you love that doesn't get out much, make sure you give them a call now and again.
Alaskan winters are hard regardless of how many friends you have.
People with guns are still people. Having anyone there will reduce harm in more cases than it escalates. Suicide is usually an impulse a lonely person who is otherwise perfectly sane carries out in the absence of intervention.
The cops in my country do work that is not about catching criminals, like leading search and rescure operations. Apparently not a problem. Apparently now these particular police have started carrying weapons as a matter of course. So that’s a bad development for a regular, peaceful presence. But overall we seem okay with the regime.
So I don’t have some personal feeling that violence is about to erupt because the police are nearby.
But I don’t see how this helps for those particular locales where the population (or segments of it) only associate active police involvement with escalation.
No one is questioning that police are people.
> Having anyone there will reduce harm in more cases than it escalates
That was never the point I was arguing against. I was arguing against which people are there.
> Suicide is usually an impulse a lonely person who is otherwise perfectly sane carries out in the absence of intervention.
I do not believe that in the slightest. There is an array of causes from physical illnesses, mental illnesses, spiritual beliefs, political beliefs, to even cultural beliefs. Sure, loneliness can contribute in some cases, but it does not hold a candle to conditions like mood disorders, psychotic disorders, substance abuse, etc..
I bet there is so much more we could do to reduce suicides, which are a massively big problem. I wish we paid as much attention to suicide as we do to very rare mass shootings, which kill a tiny fraction of the people.
It's also important to remember that any blocker between a potential suicide victim and the weapon of choice reduces rates greatly. A gun locked in a safe where the potential suicide knows the code - reduces rates.
RAND found that minimum age requirements and child-access prevention laws reduced suicides and unintentional injuries/deaths and violent crime:
* https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/child-acce...
* https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/minimum-ag...
* https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy.html
the data from CDC agrees with you, and agrees that a firearm is most common method.
but also indicates age correlate with freq of suicde by firearm.
guess who the least frequent group is, kids.
now that might fly in the face of stats, but suicide is an "intentional" thing. [that rides on the idea that you are competent to form intent when suicidal]
so yes if you keep your guns secure, and gun proof your kids to mitigate accidents that should improve things, for kids.
however take at least as much care for your grandparents, they are apparently at extreme risk, of forming intent and, acting especially grandpa.
it might work for spur of the moment almost reflex decisions, but its a different story when the choice is made over a few years, reinforced by physical reasons.
What if allowing suicide is taking care of one's grandparents? After all, if I was diagnosed with a awful condition like Alzheimer's, ALS, etc.. I am absolutely going out that way once I start having more bad days than good days.
I guess at least this removes that bit of rhetorical inconsistency... at, guaranteed, a notable cost in lives.
Choosing to end thyself IS the penultimate "my body, my choice".
We have immediate "no money, lost job, destitute" (insert temporary issue). And we have chronic, everpresent, or terminal problem.
We could fix the first one, but socially we choose not to. Either way, we should have the right of bodily autonomy.
I guess the american answer is, for a suicide help call, show up with pigs with guns, and shoot them for disorderly conduct?
they're both really really bad things. they both deserve as much attention as we can afford (which is more than they get).
not to just jump down your throat -- i agree with you about more needing to be done to prevent suicides though. i think it's a good thing that hotlines are available but it's clear that putting the onus on people who are considering suicide to reach out for help is not enough. we gotta get better at reaching out and checking on our friends, loved ones, coworkers etc and help them carry the load more than we're culturally accustomed to.
Mass shootings vary significantly state to state, in part —I think—due to different gun and mental health laws [1].
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/mass-shooting-rat...
* if so, my policy is that all guns be vaporized overnight. also, my policy would include the end of lobbying entirely, including but not limited to the small arms industry and the NRA along with police guilds and other organizations supporting the small arms race in this country
I am absolutely certain that is the case, however, society operates with such demands from individuals that a majority of necessary changes would be adamantly fought against by those which stand to benefit from the suffering.
Having been through the whole mental health treatment gamut in the USA, I am convinced the only goal of the system is to patch people up just enough that they can be churned back into the capitalist machine. What makes things even sicker, is that one's health insurance is often tied to their employment, so in order to receive basically any treatment, one is typically required to be employed and working.
Active shootings in the US kill like 100 people a year (as of 2024 I guess: https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/reports-and-publications...)
Suicides is more like 50,000/yr
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
It's a sick society when you have one for nearly every single day of the year. But hey this is the result of neoliberal economics so why should we get too upset at the societal rot when corporatists are increasing shareholder value?
I'm not sure how that changes the point I was making, which is that suicides don't seem obviously less important.
Being in school has a profound impact on whether or not a child wants to kill themselves.
http://basilhalperin.com/essays/school-and-teen-suicide.html
Where's the profit in that?
What's it going to do, help them avoid passive voice in their suicide note? Encourage them to carry it out? Hype them up about suicide? Tell them they're absolutely correct?
https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/trump-shuts-down-lg...
> The Trump administration on Thursday afternoon officially terminated the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s LGBTQ Youth Specialized Services program, which gave callers under age 25 the option to speak with LGBTQ-trained counselors.
As with the USAID cuts, this killed people.
A national hotline that can handle anyone is clearly the right way.
Now imagine you're running a massive sports team, and you have a budget for medical care. But then a government entity comes and says: regardless of outcomes, you're not allowed to hire specialists or allow your team members to elect to go to specialists, because that could be seen as unfair... regardless of whether statistics point to improved outcomes if you were allowed to have certain specialists.
Looping back to suicide hotlines: even if the administration had increased funding to the hotline to compensate for the ended specialist program (which is highly unlikely, and that this was more likely a net funding loss) - it's a similar restriction on whether a lifeline program can allocate resources to specialists. And the stakes here couldn't be higher.
(And if statistics pointed to other groups benefiting similarly from specialization, I’d want a clinician-led organization to evaluate that research and determine budget allocation towards those specialists, too.)
The data suggest otherwise [1].
Which makes sense. “For LGBTQ youth, risk factors such as bullying, abuse, negative family treatment, as well as negative emotions caused by anti-LGBTQ legislation have also been identified” [2]. If you’re in a community that’s tolerating all of that, your trust in generic institutions will be low.
> any more than Black or Asian or Indian cases
If a population is disproportionately committing suicide, they should be disproportionately resourced. “Native Americans and non-Hispanic White Americans” have “the highest suicide rate in the United States” [3].
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30109965/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_among_LGBTQ_people
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#S...
Are LGBTQ people at a higher risk for suicide? Could hotline staff reduce suicide attempts with special training? Seems like you could measure this.
Thinking about other groups with a higher risk--veterans, abuse survivors, gambling addicts--are there suicide prevention programs for these groups and are they effective?
There was actually a study done on this [0] that found LGBTQ youth are around four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their non-LGBTQ peers.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/su/su6901a3.htm
For veterans in the US, at least, there are specific programs targeting them since they do have a disproportionately high level of suicides and suicide attempts compared to the general population.
Why? The struggles different groups generally face are not the same. For a hotline for veterans, wouldn't it make sense to have counselors who are either veterans themselves or have worked extensively with veterans and their specific patterns of issues?
> A national hotline that can handle anyone is clearly the right way.
Absolutely. That describes this setup. You call the number. You get help. Sometimes that means a person trained in, say, talking to rape victims. (If you go to the ER, they'll have a nurse trained in it too!)
Per the article: "Also known as the 'Press 3 option,' the program gave 988 callers the option to 'press 3' to connect with a counselor trained to assist lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer youths and young adults (they could also text 988 with the word 'PRIDE'). Nearly 1.5 million contacts were routed to the LGBTQ service since its launch, according to data available on the SAMHSA website."
Same hotline, just a phone tree option in it.
Those are physical differences. Which isn’t to say that you’re wrong, but we could easily have different things for physical differences and not for mental differences. Should we have different prisons for gays? Same logic, no?
It’s moot in any case because the whole point is identifying groups of people who benefit from help tailored at their situation so it’d make sense to specialize even if it was a choice. If we saw tons football fans more likely to contemplate suicide after the Super Bowl we’d want to support them even though that’s unambiguously social. Helping people is what makes civilization worth having.
Good; we agree differences in a patient/customer may require special training/handling.
> Should we have different prisons for gays?
Again, this wasn't a different hotline. Just a phone tree option.
I suspect prisons, at times, have to manage things specific to gay inmates. Seems like it could cause roommate situations to be accounted for, as an example.
doubtful. There's no customer service in prison nor the ability to speak with the manager.
https://doccs.ny.gov/file-complaint
> Incarcerated Individuals can contact OSI directly by dialing 444 from any incarcerated individual phone Monday through Friday between the hours of 8:00 am and 5:00 pm.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/inmate-g...
> Every jail must develop a clear and responsive prisoner grievance procedure, including a formal means of delivering complaints and concerns from a prisoner to the administration and the procedures by which the prisoner receives a written response. However, the prisoner should not be able to use the procedures to avoid institutional rules and regulations.
> it's not my experience
Good talk.
If this were 10 years ago, this would be an understandable assumption, but today there is absolutely zero reason to reach this conclusion.
The words of our own elected representatives make it very clear why these specialists were cut: because of hatred for the LGBTQ+ community.
We have experts because we can't all possibly understand everything.
Do what you can to support marginalized folks out there. When I do any kind of political / charitable donation, my wife gets to make an equal one to any organization of her choice and often chooses the Trevor project which makes me incredibly proud of her.
It puts some responsibility on those who receive such calls, because the caller may be in a state where any additional negative input could push that caller over the edge, due to their current state of mind. So this kind of requires more training even of casual people, just as people are expected to know the basic steps necessary for first aid (on a fresh accident site, for instance). It seems pretty clear that those on the national hotline, must have had professional training too. So if there is a decline of suicides, this is most likely - and logically - due to the work by those who take up the phones.
> my assumption was that suicidal thoughts originate from one's own brain and way of thinking - adjust that and these issues would go away. Unfortunately, while this can work (for me it worked extremely well, though I should also say, I don't have suicidal thoughts to begin with
You're, in this comment and the part I quoted, saying that adjusting your thinking worked well for you (with the implication that it worked well in dealing with suicidal thoughts), but you say you don't have the problem (suicidal thoughts or ideation) under discussion. This is like saying, "I've heard that you can walk it off when you break your leg, and that's worked for me, but I've never actually had a broken leg." Complete nonsense.
Nancy Reagan “just say no” comes to mind.