Maybe we should rebrand it as a mental health hotline and directory. Most people dont know what resources for this actually exist and what they do. Mental health remediation does not have a good track record everywhere.
U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
111–120 of 354 posts
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#112"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.
Area-codeless dialing has been dead in many places for ages. My city has had multiple area codes since at least 2000 and so everyone has been providing area codes for well over two decades now. Especially too now that we have people keeping the same phone number for decades (hell, for life even) regardless of where they eventually move, trying to support this feature is a losing cause since many people would be forced to figure out the unstated area code in order to dial.
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#113[deleted]
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
My last ambulance trip in the US was billed at $12000. With my (good!) insurance I still had to pay $500.
$500 for a specialized vehicle on demand 24/7 with somewhat trained workers who have to deal with undesirable work seems pretty good. Assuming that was under the deductible, so the ambulance provider did not get paid anything else, and $500 was the negotiated pricing for members of your insurance plan.
The $40 in Ontario sounds even better tho right? Just as the billed imaginary $12k figure that only exists to make “$500 seem pretty good” sounds absurd.
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#115Suicide 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…
I've been similarly confused, but I believe that the majority of suicides are impulsive, and driven by distress rather than depression, and those are the people these services are intended to support.
I know people who have been helped and perhaps saved by suicide hotlines.
A phone call isn’t the only tool for help, but it is an important one.
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#116Earlier 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...
> most SWAT teams do 8-16 callouts a year
Which might not seem like a lot, but this scales up quickly considering there are more than 17,000 swat units in the US [0].
If we average the callouts to 12 per yer, per units, that's still 204.000 callouts per year on a nation-wide scale. A number that does not seem too unrealistic judging from past data I could find [1].
[0] https://www.theiacp.org/resources/document/national-special-...
[1] https://theweek.com/articles/531458/troubling-rise-swat-team...
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#117I’ve heard people advise not to call such hotlines because their intervention is not limited to just talking to you. It’s said they often cal the police who stop you by force and often make your life even worse than it was.
I also wonder what the impacts of having "Placed calls to the suicide hotline" in your permanent record will be on people's lives if they do choose not to take it.
With the state collecting that data, your phone company collecting that data, your cell phone OS collecting that data, random apps collecting that data, and who knows who is on the other end of that call and what they're doing with your data.
Will you be turned down for jobs because when a company has a choice between two equal job candidates and one of them has shown suicidal tendencies at any point why should they risk that their employee will kill himself and lose money on re-hiring/re-training?
Will your health insurance company buy that data? Your life insurance company?
Could you lose your right to own a firearm?
Can it cost you custody of your children?
Will it end up leaked or "lost" on a USB drive and find itself on the internet?
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#118I’ve heard people advise not to call such hotlines because their intervention is not limited to just talking to you. It’s said they often cal the police who stop you by force and often make your life even worse than it was.
Yup. A friend related a similar story to me. Having some counselors stop by or something, might be cool, but the police are basically the opposite of that, at least today, at least in most places. I can't imagine a worse sequence of events to kick off.
You don’t hear about the police interventions that go well.
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
It gets even more complicated when some areas have emergency and non-emergency converged to 911 like my county in WA does.
Even in areas where they still exist as separate numbers, they are pretty much always handled by the same calltakers.
I wonder if emergency calls jump past non-emergency calls in the queue. If so, that seems like a reasonable setup, and it would be better to call the correct number if possible.
I suppose they could even allow an incoming emergency call to interrupt a non-emergency conversation (which would be put on hold) so that emergency calls never have to wait for a non-emergency conversation to finish.
Re: U.S. transition to 988 suicide and crisis lifeline begins Saturday
#120I’ve heard people advise not to call such hotlines because their intervention is not limited to just talking to you. It’s said they often cal the police who stop you by force and often make your life even worse than it was.
Some of that is on the FAQ page: https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/988/faqs Will 988 calls be referred to 911? Currently, a small percentage of Lifeline calls require activation of the 911 system when there is imminent risk to someone’s life that cannot be reduced during the Lifeline call. In these cases, the crisis counselor shares information with 911 that is crucial to saving the caller’s life. So it does sound lik…
This is likewise true of any human interaction. It’s not like they’re going to promise to never refer a situation to emergency services.