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U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

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Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#61

Post by vorpalhex »

prvit wrote: post #26
Waterluvian wrote: post #21

Policing is in such a horrible state in America that an emergency number that excludes police involvement seems increasingly necessary. I wonder if you can get paramedics through this route or if it just rings and you eventually get a counsellor.

There are thousands of stories of people calling this number and having a SWAT team show up at their home. E: hard to even imagine what kind of an utterly horrible person would downvote this

In case anyone was wondering, most SWAT teams do 8-16 callouts a year. Major metropolitan teams might see 50ish on a busy year. The vast majority of these are hostage situations, but bomb situations and active shooters land in there too.

https://www.ksl.com/article/46295693/when-swat-teams-are-use...

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#62

Post by mindcrime »

seoaeu wrote: post #39
piker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) "is this an emergency?" yes/no must be close to O(1) (2) is this done in practice or just hypothetical?

That would add overhead to every call. The first question that they ask is: “911. Where is the emergency?”

The first question that they ask is: “911. Where is the emergency?”

That varies from PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point) to PSAP. Local policy dictates what the first thing said to the caller is. And while I believe it is the case that most PSAP's use "where is your emergency" as their first question these days, some still use "what is your emergency" instead. This is one of those things that people who work in public safety (especially dispatchers) love to have religious arguments about.

And just to go back to the point about emergency / non-emergency calls: people call 911 for all sorts of shit that isn't an emergency. And while I've been gone from dispatching for a while, from what I understand, this problem has only gotten worse over the years. Unfortunately 911 has gone from "the number I call if somebody is dying or something is on fire" to "the number I call if there is anything going on that I don't understand or don't like, and want to demand that Somebody Needs To Do Something About It." :-(

Source: former 911 dispatcher and firefighter, and have called 911 a handful of times over the years.

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#63

Post by pbourke »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #37

What constitutes a 988 emergency? I was raised with a sacrosanct view of 911. Do not call unless it is a bona fide emergency. This means something along the lines of a situation outside my expertise that poses a threat to life. Broadly speaking it ranges from medical, physical, security, and probably a host of other things I'm forgetting. However, I don't have the same instilled ideas about 988. What are the sufficie…

It gets even more complicated when some areas have emergency and non-emergency converged to 911 like my county in WA does.

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#64

Post by prvit »

vorpalhex wrote: post #61
prvit wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of stories of people calling this number and having a SWAT team show up at their home. E: hard to even imagine what kind of an utterly horrible person would downvote this

In case anyone was wondering, most SWAT teams do 8-16 callouts a year. Major metropolitan teams might see 50ish on a busy year. The vast majority of these are hostage situations, but bomb situations and active shooters land in there too. https://www.ksl.com/article/46295693/when-swat-teams-are-use...

https://theweek.com/articles/531458/troubling-rise-swat-team...

This 2015 article claims 80k deployments per year

And I guess it makes little difference whether it’s the SWAT team that shoots you or just regular cops.

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#65

Post by vorpalhex »

coding123 wrote: post #50
fuckcensorship wrote: post #42

Suicide hotlines, on the surface, seem like a good thing. Having a phone number someone can call 24/7 to talk to someone who is trained in helping someone undergoing a mental health crisis seems like an effective way to reduce suicides and benefit mental health overall. However, I think they have the opposite effect in practice. I suffer from pretty severe depression. It runs in my family and it is something I've str…

What would be more useful for people to do? I've noticed this about society too. We often employ the "easiest" solution to some major problem. Look at homelessness, theft, drugs, mass murders. None of the solutions work. (All of the problems are seemingly ALWAYS on the rise - not fall) I've been wonder if the actual root of the problem is everyone becoming an island. Communal interaction has been replaced with online…

Violent crime until recently has been generally steadily dropping since the 70s.

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#66

Post by softwaredoug »

Waterluvian wrote: post #21

Policing is in such a horrible state in America that an emergency number that excludes police involvement seems increasingly necessary. I wonder if you can get paramedics through this route or if it just rings and you eventually get a counsellor.

Policing in the US is shit in part because other social services are under developed that the police have to double for everything. Frankly it’s crisis too because doing social services and policing is a shit job that isn’t going to attract the best and brightest. Add to that it’s a job for Iraq and Afghanistan vets probably suffering from their share of PTSD, and you get a pretty volatile combo

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#67

Post by DigiDigiorno »

danachow wrote: post #59
fuckcensorship wrote: post #42

Suicide hotlines, on the surface, seem like a good thing. Having a phone number someone can call 24/7 to talk to someone who is trained in helping someone undergoing a mental health crisis seems like an effective way to reduce suicides and benefit mental health overall. However, I think they have the opposite effect in practice. I suffer from pretty severe depression. It runs in my family and it is something I've str…

Quoted post unavailable.

Let me help you with brevity, as it relates to his specific points:

“I disagree”

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#68

Post by stop50 »

coding123 wrote: post #50
fuckcensorship wrote: post #42

Suicide hotlines, on the surface, seem like a good thing. Having a phone number someone can call 24/7 to talk to someone who is trained in helping someone undergoing a mental health crisis seems like an effective way to reduce suicides and benefit mental health overall. However, I think they have the opposite effect in practice. I suffer from pretty severe depression. It runs in my family and it is something I've str…

What would be more useful for people to do? I've noticed this about society too. We often employ the "easiest" solution to some major problem. Look at homelessness, theft, drugs, mass murders. None of the solutions work. (All of the problems are seemingly ALWAYS on the rise - not fall) I've been wonder if the actual root of the problem is everyone becoming an island. Communal interaction has been replaced with online…

From what i could see from europe from the news: mental illness: call the police mass shooting: thoughts and prayer black person lives: kill him

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#69

Post by cmg »

Kye wrote: post #56
cmg wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experience in this field: I ran technology for one of the only hotlines in the US that didn't engage in non-consensual active rescue [0] [1]. I've written about this a little on this site in the past, when Crisis Text Line was caught sharing data. Many, if not most, of these places give the operator full access to your phone number and whatever geolocation data they can get based on that. They also have polici…

I see people recommend Trans Lifeline all the time. Are you able to offer specifics on this?

I'm hesitant to answer this because a lot of what I'd have to say can't be corroborated except for people who work or worked there. I'll summarize, with the understanding that I left a month after the 2020 election (I gave my notice in October 2020 and stayed on to get the organization through potential security issues around the election).

- A culture of internal anti-Blackness. During the uprising of 2020, staff and volunteers wanted the leadership team to address real issues with race inside the organization. As a member of the leadership team at the Director level, I pushed for many of the staff-led changes, but most of the team wanted to just talk about things instead of implementing policies.

- I had a bug in some software I wrote - applications for a service were supposed to be distributed based on race. A few more white people than they wanted got through. I fixed the bug immediately (it was a concurrency issue), explained it, and was met with absolute hostility - shouted at in meetings, labeled a white supremacist and removed from leadership. A plan was developed to have mediation, but after months nothing happened.

- From what I understand, they have basically gotten rid of their QA program that would review calls to make sure operators are properly trained and handling calls appropriately.

- A former staff member went missing during a mental health crisis. They said they were going to provide FMLA but fired her instead, leaving her partner and children without any financial support.

- Piss-poor answer rate. After they fired their Hotline Program Director last year, basically no one stepped up to run the hotline. Folks I've heard from have reported that many volunteers (the backbone of the hotline department) left, new volunteers weren't being processed properly.

Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday

#70

Post by JohnTHaller »

bigbillheck wrote: post #45

"988" is a perfectly valid 7 digit prefix. Turns out they're dealing with that fact by making 10 digit dialing mandatory in area codes that have it.

Requiring 10 digit dialing was implemented in the affected areas 9 months ago. As an aside, I haven't dialed a 7 digit number in about 20 years. Then again, I live in NYC with 7 different area codes.
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