October 20, 2025 • 35 mins
Margaret talks to you about the history of suicide prevention hotlines and the complications of state intervention in emergency mental health care.
Sources-
https://translifeline.org/about/history/
https://translifeline.org/response-to-988-cuts/
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/10/27/359434925/bernard-mayes-nprs-first-chairman-founder-of-suicide-hotline-dies
https://www.sfgate.com/living/article/Bernard-Mayes-to-be-honored-as-lifeline-to-3516576.php
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11447250/Bernard-Mayes-priest-obituary.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20141026134947/http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2014/10/24/bernard-mayes-kqed-fms-first-general-manager-dies-at-85
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45106/sonnet-116-let-me-not-to-the-marriage-of-true-minds
https://www.sfsuicide.org/about/
https://translifeline.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/The-Problem-With-988-Report-November-2024-Text.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11733462/
https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6978712/
https://www.psychiatry.org/News-room/APA-Blogs/Marking-Two-Years-of-988-The-Suicide-and-Crisis-Li
https://behavioralhealthlink.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/988-History-Journal-Article_JohnDraper.pdf
https://www.inclusivetherapists.com/blog/suicide-mental-health-crisis-resources-not-police
https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/her-death-sparked-transgender-day-remembrance-22-years-later-still-n1233809
https://www.them.us/story/rita-hester-trans-remembrance-visibility-memorial
https://translifeline.org/why-no-non-consensual-intervention/
https://www.them.us/story/trans-lifeline-report-988-police-interventions
https://madattheinternet.substack.com/p/online-censorships-institutional
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32121226
https://glaad.org/tdor/
https://web.archive.org/web/20250107195548/https://cohost.org/lizthegrey/post/1520523-some-philanthropy-th
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool Peoplehooded Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's
people trying to do good things, often succeeding at doing
good things. And really it's the trying that is the succeeding.
That's the subtext of the show. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and every week I talk about cool people, hoohed cool stuff.
(00:25):
It's right there in the title of the show. And
why am I vamping instead of introducing a guest, Well,
it's because there's no guest. It's just me. I like
to do these episodes every now and then. It gives
myself a little bit of a break. I have to
do just as much prep work actually, so it's not
really much of a break. It's just a different way
of working. And I crave variety, so I like working
(00:49):
in different ways at different times. So that's why I
like to do episodes without a guest sometimes. And this
week we are going to be talking about suicide hotlines
to quote the Mighty Trent Resnor, how are you doing tonight?
(01:10):
Having a good time? Ready to party, have fun? Yeah,
well that was the last guys. Wrong fucking band we're
here to have a bad time because I don't know.
I mean, it's actually hopefully still going to be fun.
But also I would enjoy going to Trent Resnor tonight
in Chanelle's playing a show, so clearly it's not actually
(01:31):
a bad time. Sometimes talking about super serious stuff or
dark stuff is what we like to do, and it's
important to be upfront right at the top. This is
not an episode about how to help yourself or others
deal with suicidal ideation or any of that stuff. It
(01:51):
is the history episode about people who've created structures to
help people, and I don't know, I find that stuff
fascinating and I wanted to read about it this week.
I'm actually doing all right. By the way, this is
a thing that a lot of my friends struggle with
and always have, and so I care about those friends,
and I don't know, it was on my mind, so
(02:13):
I wanted to read about it this week, And unfortunately
it's also on my mind because the political situation is
making it harder for hotlines for lifelines, and it's fucked
up and we should be you know, a lot of
the subtext of a lot of the episodes this year
has been like stuff that we take kind of for
(02:36):
granted that the government is trying to take away from
us now that it's fascist. So this is kind of
another episode in that vein crisis hotlines. You are going
to be shocked, absolutely shocked. You're not going to be
shocked at all to know that crisis hotlines in the
United States come out of gay culture. Like a lot
(02:58):
of our stories, this one's arts in San Francisco. In fact,
it starts tied deeply into another one of our recent stories.
A few weeks or months back, What is Time these Days?
I did a series of episodes about the founding of
public radio and how it started in the US and
the Bay with PACIFICA Radio. I didn't actually carry that
(03:18):
story forward into time into NPR, but we're going to
do that a little bit this week because the first
suicide hotline was started in the early nineteen sixties by
a gay British priest named Bernard Mays, who was also
the first chairman of National Public Radio. He he's such
(03:42):
a quintessential cool people who did cool stuff. I found
nothing negative about him in all of the shit that
I spent researching him, and to be fair, I didn't
read he did write an autobiography later in his life,
and I haven't read that. I've read like people talking
about it, and a lot of people talking about his life.
But yeah, I'm not finding the dirt on this guy.
He just actually seems really genuinely cool and interested in
(04:05):
a ton of different things in helping people. Now, of
course he did say British. Bernard Mays was British, but
we can't hold that against him. No one controls how
they were born, which in this case was in nineteen
twenty nine in the aforementioned country of England. He went
to school at Cambridge studying ancient languages and history, and
(04:27):
worked as a high school teacher teaching those same things.
And this also means he was a teen young teen
during World War Two, and I haven't read much about that,
but that obviously is going to impact your life. Then,
you know, he's working as a high school teacher and
he falls in love with this other boy who was like, yeah,
(04:49):
but what if you joined the church? Though, Bernard went
and became an Anglican priest. Bernard moved to the US,
and Bernard himself basically says he got seduced into the church,
And I think that's really funny because later he's going
to do a lot of the work to help the
Anglican Church understand LGBT stuff. He moves to the US
(05:10):
in nineteen fifty eight, first to Greenwich Village in Manhattan,
and then he gets himself transferred by the church to
San Francisco in nineteen sixty. He has been doing radio
stuff as soon as he gets the US, maybe before then.
He's the BBC's West Coast correspondent, and he kept filing
story after story of people dying by suicide. In fact,
(05:35):
at the time, it was the suicide capital of the
Western world. The suicide rate there at the time was
I think roughly into like thirty out of one hundred
thousand people, which is like twice even what higher numbers
later are going to be. There's a place with a
lot of risk of suicide, and I think that that
has to do a lot with homophobia and things like that.
(05:59):
So he gets there and he has an idea. It's
also possible he went to San Francisco specifically to do
this idea. I've read so many contradictory things because people
do a lot of myth making around this man, and
he participates in some of the myth making himself. As
far as I can tell either way, he's in San Francisco.
He's like, I want to do something about this. I
(06:21):
want to start to talk to people who are feeling suicidal.
He was like, I should use an alias and start
a hotline. Now, the idea of using hot lines to
organize like these days, crisis lines are actually some of
the only like hotlines we really have left. But in
other parts of the world and in the recent memory
(06:41):
of the past, you would do things like if you
wanted to say, for example, like have a radical events calendar,
you get an answering machine and you'd put, hey, everyone,
this week, these are the events, and you put that
on the answering machine and then you publicize the number.
Or you know, there have been all kinds of hot
lines throughout time. There was even while reading about radio
(07:02):
in Britain a couple of weeks ago, months ago, something
like that there was like a hotline that was a
call an anarchist hot line where you had questions about anarchism,
you could call this hotline. And also specifically, queer culture
has used hotlines for a very long time because one
of the things is that like queerness when it's not
(07:25):
accepted is a very isolating experience, and so people have
been using whatever technology is available to break that isolation.
And it's just so interesting because you know, those uses
tend to predate crisis hotlines, but crisis hotlines are sort
of what's left now that there's the Internet and all
these other things. Anyway, he's like, I should use an
(07:48):
alias start a hotline. So we starts shopping around for
a room to rent to run the service out of.
And there's a couple stories about how this went down,
and both of them are sort of interesting. One of them,
the story that he tells himself, is that landlord after
landlord would turn him down when he told them his plans.
(08:08):
But then when he told his plans to one manager
at an apartment place, he was like, Hey, I want
to start talking to people who are considering suicide. And
the manager said, you mean like this, and he put
out his arms and he showed the slash marks on
his own wrists, and that manager rented Bernard the room
for half price. Now, the organization that he goes on
(08:32):
to start San Francisco Suicide Prevention, they actually tell a
different version of the story than he tells his organization
tells the story that the first office was in the
basement of an apartment building and the manager assumed they
were an escort service. And I've also read that it
started in nineteen sixty one, and I've read that it
started in nineteen sixty two, which is I think why
(08:53):
most articles just say in the early nineteen sixties is
they probably ran across the same thing I did. Either way,
he got a room and he needed to advertise. But
do you know who else needs to advertise? Advertisers? It's
literally their job description. And you know who needs to
sell space to advertisers? Me, because that's the way that
(09:19):
the economics of podcast work, besides setting up like crowdfunding,
and I don't want to do that and I'm uncle
zoned medium, and so what we do is advertise, except
actually you can sign up for Cooler Zone Media and
then you don't have to listen to ads. Instead, you
just get to listen to me do long strange ad
transitions twice a day a day an episode, here's ads,
(09:47):
and we're back. So our man. He goes, and he
sets up ads on buses that say, thinking of ending
it all, call Bruce with a phone number. He also
would go to bars in the Tenderloin, which is at
the time it's the nightlife, crime and gay district of
the city, and starts passing out match books with the
(10:09):
hotline's number on them. I've also read that he just
made flyers. He goes around and he starts telling people
about this, like, Hey, there's this number you can call
the number. He got one caller on the very first
night the hotline was open. He got ten callers in
the first week. These days, operators have a lot of
(10:30):
training on what to say and what not to say,
about how to listen. Bernard learned on the job by
listening by offering an anonymous person to talk to and look,
I hate the British as much as the next white
American girl who's pinned most of her personality on being
(10:51):
like a third generation Irish diaspora person. But my god,
are British accents easy on the ears When you're down.
There might be nothing nicer than picking up the phone
and talking to a nice gay priest with a British
accent and a radio announcer's voice. And so it worked.
I mean, he actually held to the end of his
(11:13):
life that he did not. Because everything was anonymous. He
could not tell you that he saved a single life.
And that is not false humility, but it's humility. And
because he absolutely saved a ton of people's lives. And
I'm sure people told him that he wasn't specifically anti suicide.
(11:34):
He said later, quote, you want to kill yourself, kill yourself.
You have every right to do so. But not in
like a flippant, like ahe go out and do this
thing way, but rather like you know, believing in people's
agency kind of way. What he wanted to do and
what he did is he wanted to help people who
wanted a way forward, a way to escape those thoughts,
(11:54):
which is what people who call hotlines are doing. Right.
And over the first fifty years that that hotline was
in place in San Francisco, it's now been sixty years,
we're coming on probably sixty five years. Over the first
fifty years that the hot line was in place, the
suicide rate in San Francisco dropped to half of what
it had been. And it you know, there's no proof
(12:19):
of causality there, right, but there's no reason to doubt
that it was a significant part of that. I suspect
that also, like gay liberation movements and acceptance and things
like that are a very big part of that as well.
But those are all tied in together. We all just
do the work. We can't always measure the work we do,
(12:40):
and sometimes getting lost and trying to measure the work
we do is a distraction. I think sometimes it's best
to just do the work we do. Bernard stuck around
with the hot line for ten years and then he
left because founder syndrome is a real thing. Founders are
often bad at continuing projects indefinitely because once they scale up,
(13:03):
they demand too much control and authority just instinctually, or
as Bernard put it, quote, the people who start things
mustn't stay too long because if you do stay too long,
you will kill it by your own oppression. I just
really like how blunt that is as someone who sometimes
struggles with that. Shout out to my collective mates, thanks
(13:24):
for putting up with me at meetings. By the time
that Bernard left, San Francisco's Suicide Prevention was fielding two
hundred calls a day and they had ten people on
staff and one hundred volunteers. San Francisco's Suicide Prevention as
a model was spreading across the country. He also then,
like in the late sixties, founded the publicly funded radio
(13:46):
station KQED, partly with influence from the BBC. It was
like kind of a like, how do we bring BBC
shows to the United States? The United States radio landscape
is entirely not entirely as pacifica, but it is by
and large not public radio, is largely commercial radio. And
so they're like, well, how do we do it, And like, oh,
why don't we set up a publicly funded radio station, KQED,
(14:09):
And soon KQED became the most listened to radio station
in the country. So then they went on to help
found the National Public Radio Entre Bernard was part of
in nineteen seventy and he was the first chairman of NPR.
And I almost fell down this whole rabbit hole, and
I didn't put it in the script, but basically there
(14:29):
was this whole thing where it was actually very hard
to start NPR because you have all these independent radio
stations and they very much like being independent, and so
actually trying to say like, no, we're all going to
be part of this national thing with this national branding.
There was a lot of pushback and kind of understandably,
we're actually, as we're going to as we talk about
suicide prevention hotlines, we're going to talk about the complicated
(14:51):
nature of creating some of these larger structures without being
against it at all. And I know what you're thinking,
this is isn't an ad break. I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, but Margaret, how this week are you going
to tie suicide prevention hotlines into JRR Tolkien. Well, I'm
(15:15):
proud to tell you that Bernard Mays, one of the
founders of NPR and the founder of suicide Hotlines, not
only adapted Lord of the Rings to radio in nineteen
seventy nine for NPR, but he also voiced Gandolf and
Tom Bombadil for that production. So if you want to
hear this man, you can go find the nineteen seventy
nine production of Lord of the Rings. He became a
(15:37):
college professor in the nineties. I think he started an
LGBT campus group while he was there, and he left
the church, the Anglican Church in nineteen ninety two. I've
seen it said that he became an atheist, but I
don't know if that's quite right, because he actually became
something that I think is more interesting. He became a soupist.
(15:58):
He became the only super He wrote a book called
Escaping God's Closet, The Revelations of a Queer Priest and
his Friends. Quoted by NPR said quote, Bernard revealed why
he ultimately renounced the priesthood and religion and described the interdependence, interaction,
(16:19):
and endless exchange within the universe as the soup. For Bernard,
the inter relationship of all things necessitated a particular efic
that he whimsically dubbed supism. For Bernard, supism was derived
from the belief that love for others, egalitarian government, universal education,
(16:40):
and respect for the planet and all that live upon
it are critical for the continued health, well being, and
survival of the human species. And I like that. I
think it's called Carsonization or something where like every evolution
moves towards crab, if like all plants eventually evolve towards
tree like independently, and all of these things evolve towards
(17:03):
crab independently. Right. You can also see this in the
suv world, where you know, all cars are slowly becoming
smallish SUVs, which is why I call them crabs, and
I'm trying to spread that we should all call the
little four door hatchback SUVs crabs. But I feel like
soupism is kind of the crab of cool people who
(17:25):
did cool stuff religion. This sort of like not a
denial of divinity, but a sort of pantheism because it
maybe I'm just thinking this because it just did the
episode on secret societies and Masons and Illuminati and all
that stuff, and they basically are teaching pantheism but coming
out of a Christian framework, And I feel like seekers
(17:45):
religious seekers usually come up with like, oh, everything is divine.
That's the crab of religion. For good reason. Anyway, our
soupist returned to the rest of the year universe when
he died at eighty five years old in twenty fourteen
from complications from Parkinson's disease. When he died, his close
(18:09):
friends were with him reading him Shakespeare specifically, he died
while they were reading him Sonnet one hundred and sixteen.
And this isn't from a play. It was a separate
poem that Shakespeare wrote, And I'm just going to read
it to you because I'm a sucker and I like
this guy. And this is what people were reading him
as he returned to the soup. Let me not to
(18:33):
the marriage of true minds, admit impediments. Love is not love,
which alters when it alteration, finds or bends with the
remover to remove. Oh No, it is an ever fixed
mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It
is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth so unknown.
(18:54):
Although his height be taken, Love's not time's fool, though
wrote lips and cheeks within his bending sickles compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but
bears it out even to the edge of doom. If
this be air upon me proved, I never write, nor
(19:16):
no man ever loved. Yeah, I just love alters not,
you know, but bears out even to the edge of doom,
thick and fucking thin. So it's not surprising at all
to me that the first suicide prevention hotline in the
US was started by a gay man. Queers have always
been on top of caring for one another because we've
(19:38):
always needed mutual aid and solidarity literally in order to survive.
To tie in another recent series of episodes, when we
talked about mutual aid in the Animal Kingdom. We talked
about how in the nineteenth century the geologist, biologist and
anarchist communist Peter Kropok can prove that cooperation is at
least as important of a factor in evolutionist competition, and
(19:58):
that specifically, the harsh the environment, the more animals work
together to survive that environment. So yeah, queers invented this shit.
It's also, though not surprising to me, that he was
a priest. Before there was philosophy, there was theology, before
there was therapy, there was confession. The confession booth isn't historically,
(20:22):
as far as I understand it, a place for punishment
or self flagellation per se, but rather one where you
could talk to someone about how you've been feeling and
acting and how you wish you were feeling and acting instead.
The confession system is not above critique, but that was
and is an important part of its social role. And
(20:44):
I don't know a ton about the Anglican Church to
see the aforementioned built my entire identity around opposition to
everything English, because why would I bother understanding nuance when
I can pick an identity that is vaguely related to
me and carry it too far. I don't know a
ton about the Anglicans, but I do know that they
do confession as well, and San Francisco's suicide prevention is
(21:10):
still around. By nineteen eighty nine, they started an HIV
nightline so that HIV patients who couldn't sleep because the
pain had someone to talk to. And I actually want
to focus on this part of it for a second,
because the modern landscape of suicide prevention hotlines is fairly professionalized, medicalized,
(21:35):
and tied into the emergency response system and therefore police
and things like that. We're going to get a lot
into that, I think, especially in part two of this episode,
but its roots are just I need to be listened to.
I'm in pain, and I want to talk to someone,
(21:58):
ideally someone who can understand, someone who's been in the
same situation or a comparable situation, or has been around
people in this situation before. But I just need to
talk to someone. I can't sleep because I'm hurting, because
I'm dying. When I first read about HIV nightline for
HIV patients wouldn't sleep because of pain, I was like,
that seems related, but not directly related. But the more
(22:20):
I think about it, the more just directly related those
two things are I need someone to listen to me.
I feel like I'm dying and I'm in pain. And
here's to everyone whoever staffed that line. Here's to everyone
who's ever staffed any suicide hotline and just been there
(22:45):
to listen to people, much like you can listen to dads. No,
I feel terrible. I don't like that dad transition. I'm
stuck with it. So are you. I'm sorry I have
failed you, and we're back as far as I can tell.
(23:05):
The San Francisco hotline was the first. It's usually attributed
as the first, but there was one that started roughly
around the same time, probably shortly thereafter. Before the San
Francisco Hotline, some psychologists in Los Angeles partnered with the
National Institute of Mental Health to start the Los Angeles
Suicide Prevention Center. And this is a very different background, right.
(23:31):
This is a research and outreach center and it is
the first one of its kind in the country. They
also started a hotline in nineteen sixty two. This hotline,
they're much more scientific about the whole thing. They collect
anonymous data about the callers, and that has advantages and disadvantages.
I'm actually not trying to come for that model versus
(23:51):
a different model, right, I understand why we use data
to try and make decisions as a society. This led
to the American Association of Suicideology in nineteen sixty eight,
which researched all this stuff, and they started an a
credittion program for crisis centers by nineteen seventy six, which
(24:12):
was necessary because the LA and San Francisco programs kind
of proved how important they were. Although actually we'll get
into it. They didn't necessarily, like statistically prove that, but
they were ideas that people were into. There was no
evidence against them either. It's still very hard to measure
the success of these sorts of things. By nineteen seventy one,
(24:34):
there's two hundred different centers around the US, but while
a lot of them ran hotlines, they tended not to
focus on these hotlines at all. The point of the
phone calls were to screen people for in person consultations,
because I think they're coming from more of the scientific model,
and or they thought that in person consultations were like
(24:55):
you know, oh, you have a medical problem, go see
the doctor, versus like I just fucking need someone to
talk to. It's such a fascinating dichotomy. And like all dichotomies,
it's false and there's like things to be advantages and
disadvantages and oh, I don't want to get as dialectics,
but sometimes two things that seem really opposite. If you
take the things that are good about each other and
(25:17):
the ways that are in conflict, you can come up
with something really beautiful synthesis, as it were for you
theory nerds out there. And then the government, for better
or worse, started to get involved in this stuff. In
the nineteen nineties, the Substance Abuse in Mental Health Services
Administration SAMSUH SAM SAMPSA. I'm gonna call it SAMSAI even
(25:40):
the it's an h in there. They started a new
center for Mental Health Services and started surveying what the
various clinics and crisis centers were up to to try
and come up with a plan. And the federal government
starts getting more involved and things get messy. Don't get
(26:01):
me wrong, I think every volunteer and staffer who works
these lines is a hero, a bonafide cool person who
did cool stuff. But the more these services started getting
tied into governmental framework. The more they started working with
other emergency services, including less savory emergency services aka the police.
(26:22):
If you haven't, you should go back and listen to
Robert Evans and prop doing a very long series called
Behind the Police. It's a subsection of Behind the Bastards,
and it traces the fact that the United States police
come from slave patrols in the US South and then
like bad shit and I can't remember exactly the details
(26:43):
of it, but like different bad shit in the North,
and the police have never gotten better. They are an
instrument of white supremacy. People have attempted various ways of
making them not be that way. I don't think that
they're currently succeeding anyway. So even when they first started
interacting with the state, these emergency services like mental health
(27:05):
as emergency service, it's then tied into other emergency services
like the cops. To say nothing about how things have
gone this year twenty twenty five with the whole fascism thing, well,
actually we're going to say a decent bit about that part.
But later, So in two thousand and one, Congress was like, sure,
we'll give some money to a national hotline to stop suicide.
(27:29):
The idea was and is a single number that people
can call that will direct them to a more local,
specialized organization for help. This is not a bad idea.
And you know, one of these local organizations is San
Francisco's Suicide Prevention. They've been part of this framework for
a long time now. It took a couple of years,
(27:49):
but by two thousand and five, the National Suicide Prevention
Hotline opened and it got forty six thousand calls in
the first year it was open. Soon enough, they start
doing sub sections for people who are like specifically at
risk and or need kind of specific kinds of care
and help. So they partnered with a Department of Veterans
(28:10):
Affairs to add a Press one option for veterans specific counseling,
and then a Press two option for Spanish language help. Eventually,
like decades later, they're going to add a Press three
option for LGBTQ plus specific folks who need help and
want to be able to talk to someone who has
(28:31):
dealt with a similar situation. I can't actually tell you
about the efficacy of this hotline because suicide rates in
the US have been steadily on the rise since the
year two thousand, which is the furthest back. I found
data on the CDC website. There's one exception one year
in the past twenty five years where suicide rates fell
(28:53):
markedly before returning to normal the next year, and that
was the year of Our Lord twenty twenty, which is
not what I would have expected. There have been studies
and studies of studies to determine the efficacy of these hotlines.
Literally the study of study I read has studied hundreds
of studies, but the data isn't conclusive yet. It does
(29:14):
seem to indicate that they help, especially in the short
term and the near long term. It's not that they
don't help long term, it's that it is incredibly hard
to effectively study right. People who call suicide hotlines are
more likely than other people to die by suicide, much
as the same as if you have I don't know Parkinson's,
(29:39):
you're more likely to call a Parkinson's Help hotline than
someone who doesn't, And it doesn't mean that the hotline
is why you die to Parkinson's anyway. That study of
study does show, however, that counselors who've taken the training
course Applied Suicide Intervention Skills train Assist did a better
(30:02):
job than counselors who did not. So there is evidence
that some level of formalization has had positive impacts. I
want to be clear about that because I'm kind of
coming out strong for the like you just want to
talk to a gay Anglican priest a model, but like,
well not just that, I'm just using him as an example.
(30:22):
But there's a lot of different ways to try and
do this. But suicide rates were going up throughout the
twenty first century and have been, and by twenty eighteen
the government was like, all right, we should probably make
this a three digit number instead of a ten digit number.
And by twenty twenty two it happened. Nine eight eight
is the national crisis number. And as soon as it
(30:44):
was a number you could actually remember, nine eight eight,
call volume went up nationally by forty percent. And these
calls are routed to a national network of more than
two hundred crisis centers, many of which started off as
independent hotlines. However, many of them are in life literally
the same building as nine to one one operators and
are very deeply tied into that system. And these independent
(31:07):
hotlines immediately get access to one point five billion dollars
set aside to fund the program. In the first two
years of nine eight eight, it fielded ten million calls
and texts and chats. And yeah, you've still got the
Press one option, which saw just for numbers, for the
fact that these are useful, these separate ones Press one
(31:29):
option and twenty twenty four the Press one option for
Veterans Help saw sixty five thousand calls, the Press two
option for Spanish saw ten thousand calls, and that the
Press three option for LGBTQ plus folks saw thirty seven
thousand calls. But it's tied into that first responder network.
Ostensibly part of nine eight eight's goal and like why
(31:51):
it was set up is to move emergency mental health
away from the police focused nine to one to one
so that fewer cops need to be involved in christ
this intervention. But it's part of the government, so it's
not exactly coming out acab. In exchange for access to
federal funding, these local crisis centers have to agree to
(32:13):
what you could call non consensual intervention. So this thing
that was supposed to mean the police wouldn't get involved
in your crisis gets the police involved, not just ambulances,
although even that's contentious and it brands itself that is
private and confidential if you call it, but it's not.
It talks to the police. I'm going to get into
(32:37):
alternatives in a little bit, but the trans Lifeline, which
is not part of the nine eight eight network, spent
years trying to get transparency out of the nine eight
eight network about how often the police were called and
how often non consensual intervention was done. Most of the
higher up organizations involved in nine eight eight, it's very
complicated SAMSA like basically pay is a grant to another organization,
(33:01):
and then all of these smaller organizations like take part
of it whatever. Most of the higher up organizations involved
in nine eight eight blocked the requests for data from
the people studying it at every turn, including people like
putting in Freedom of Information Act requests. Some of the
local organizations involved in nine eight eight, like the Trevor
Project which supports especially LGBTUTH, were open and forthcoming about
(33:26):
their data and as for what they found the trans
Lifeline researchers. I hate breaking this episode here, but this
is where I'm gonna break it because it's halfway through
my script. As for what they found and what the
trans Lifeline is all about you have to wait until
Wednesday unless you can't wait. I feel this is just
not an OK place to break it. Translfeline does not
(33:48):
do non consensual intervention, and their number in the US
is eight seven seven five six five eight eight six zero.
In Canada it's eight seven seven three three zero six
three sixty six and their hours are every day from
one pm to nine pm Eastern. But again, this is
not an episode about how to get help. This is
(34:09):
not an episode about how to help your friends. This
is an episode about some of the cool people who
try to help people, whether they do it in the
formal structure like nine to eight eight, or whether they
do it in a actually still formal structure, just not
tied into you know, governmental stuff like the trans Lifeline. Anyway,
I hope you all are doing as well as you can,
(34:31):
and I hope y'all are taking care of each other
and telling your friends that you love each other and
doing all those things because you should. Because it's better
to just be earnest and be about what you're about
and care for each other. Right see in a couple days,
(34:54):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stop is a production of
Cool Zone Media. The more podcasts Normal Zone Media. Visit
our website folezonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
M
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool Peoplehooded Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's
people trying to do good things, often succeeding at doing
good things. And really it's the trying that is the succeeding.
That's the subtext of the show. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy,
and every week I talk about cool people, hoohed cool stuff.
(00:25):
It's right there in the title of the show. And
why am I vamping instead of introducing a guest, Well,
it's because there's no guest. It's just me. I like
to do these episodes every now and then. It gives
myself a little bit of a break. I have to
do just as much prep work actually, so it's not
really much of a break. It's just a different way
of working. And I crave variety, so I like working
(00:49):
in different ways at different times. So that's why I
like to do episodes without a guest sometimes. And this
week we are going to be talking about suicide hotlines
to quote the Mighty Trent Resnor, how are you doing tonight?
(01:10):
Having a good time? Ready to party, have fun? Yeah,
well that was the last guys. Wrong fucking band we're
here to have a bad time because I don't know.
I mean, it's actually hopefully still going to be fun.
But also I would enjoy going to Trent Resnor tonight
in Chanelle's playing a show, so clearly it's not actually
(01:31):
a bad time. Sometimes talking about super serious stuff or
dark stuff is what we like to do, and it's
important to be upfront right at the top. This is
not an episode about how to help yourself or others
deal with suicidal ideation or any of that stuff. It
(01:51):
is the history episode about people who've created structures to
help people, and I don't know, I find that stuff
fascinating and I wanted to read about it this week.
I'm actually doing all right. By the way, this is
a thing that a lot of my friends struggle with
and always have, and so I care about those friends,
and I don't know, it was on my mind, so
(02:13):
I wanted to read about it this week, And unfortunately
it's also on my mind because the political situation is
making it harder for hotlines for lifelines, and it's fucked
up and we should be you know, a lot of
the subtext of a lot of the episodes this year
has been like stuff that we take kind of for
(02:36):
granted that the government is trying to take away from
us now that it's fascist. So this is kind of
another episode in that vein crisis hotlines. You are going
to be shocked, absolutely shocked. You're not going to be
shocked at all to know that crisis hotlines in the
United States come out of gay culture. Like a lot
(02:58):
of our stories, this one's arts in San Francisco. In fact,
it starts tied deeply into another one of our recent stories.
A few weeks or months back, What is Time these Days?
I did a series of episodes about the founding of
public radio and how it started in the US and
the Bay with PACIFICA Radio. I didn't actually carry that
(03:18):
story forward into time into NPR, but we're going to
do that a little bit this week because the first
suicide hotline was started in the early nineteen sixties by
a gay British priest named Bernard Mays, who was also
the first chairman of National Public Radio. He he's such
(03:42):
a quintessential cool people who did cool stuff. I found
nothing negative about him in all of the shit that
I spent researching him, and to be fair, I didn't
read he did write an autobiography later in his life,
and I haven't read that. I've read like people talking
about it, and a lot of people talking about his life.
But yeah, I'm not finding the dirt on this guy.
He just actually seems really genuinely cool and interested in
(04:05):
a ton of different things in helping people. Now, of
course he did say British. Bernard Mays was British, but
we can't hold that against him. No one controls how
they were born, which in this case was in nineteen
twenty nine in the aforementioned country of England. He went
to school at Cambridge studying ancient languages and history, and
(04:27):
worked as a high school teacher teaching those same things.
And this also means he was a teen young teen
during World War Two, and I haven't read much about that,
but that obviously is going to impact your life. Then,
you know, he's working as a high school teacher and
he falls in love with this other boy who was like, yeah,
(04:49):
but what if you joined the church? Though, Bernard went
and became an Anglican priest. Bernard moved to the US,
and Bernard himself basically says he got seduced into the church,
And I think that's really funny because later he's going
to do a lot of the work to help the
Anglican Church understand LGBT stuff. He moves to the US
(05:10):
in nineteen fifty eight, first to Greenwich Village in Manhattan,
and then he gets himself transferred by the church to
San Francisco in nineteen sixty. He has been doing radio
stuff as soon as he gets the US, maybe before then.
He's the BBC's West Coast correspondent, and he kept filing
story after story of people dying by suicide. In fact,
(05:35):
at the time, it was the suicide capital of the
Western world. The suicide rate there at the time was
I think roughly into like thirty out of one hundred
thousand people, which is like twice even what higher numbers
later are going to be. There's a place with a
lot of risk of suicide, and I think that that
has to do a lot with homophobia and things like that.
(05:59):
So he gets there and he has an idea. It's
also possible he went to San Francisco specifically to do
this idea. I've read so many contradictory things because people
do a lot of myth making around this man, and
he participates in some of the myth making himself. As
far as I can tell either way, he's in San Francisco.
He's like, I want to do something about this. I
(06:21):
want to start to talk to people who are feeling suicidal.
He was like, I should use an alias and start
a hotline. Now, the idea of using hot lines to
organize like these days, crisis lines are actually some of
the only like hotlines we really have left. But in
other parts of the world and in the recent memory
(06:41):
of the past, you would do things like if you
wanted to say, for example, like have a radical events calendar,
you get an answering machine and you'd put, hey, everyone,
this week, these are the events, and you put that
on the answering machine and then you publicize the number.
Or you know, there have been all kinds of hot
lines throughout time. There was even while reading about radio
(07:02):
in Britain a couple of weeks ago, months ago, something
like that there was like a hotline that was a
call an anarchist hot line where you had questions about anarchism,
you could call this hotline. And also specifically, queer culture
has used hotlines for a very long time because one
of the things is that like queerness when it's not
(07:25):
accepted is a very isolating experience, and so people have
been using whatever technology is available to break that isolation.
And it's just so interesting because you know, those uses
tend to predate crisis hotlines, but crisis hotlines are sort
of what's left now that there's the Internet and all
these other things. Anyway, he's like, I should use an
(07:48):
alias start a hotline. So we starts shopping around for
a room to rent to run the service out of.
And there's a couple stories about how this went down,
and both of them are sort of interesting. One of them,
the story that he tells himself, is that landlord after
landlord would turn him down when he told them his plans.
(08:08):
But then when he told his plans to one manager
at an apartment place, he was like, Hey, I want
to start talking to people who are considering suicide. And
the manager said, you mean like this, and he put
out his arms and he showed the slash marks on
his own wrists, and that manager rented Bernard the room
for half price. Now, the organization that he goes on
(08:32):
to start San Francisco Suicide Prevention, they actually tell a
different version of the story than he tells his organization
tells the story that the first office was in the
basement of an apartment building and the manager assumed they
were an escort service. And I've also read that it
started in nineteen sixty one, and I've read that it
started in nineteen sixty two, which is I think why
(08:53):
most articles just say in the early nineteen sixties is
they probably ran across the same thing I did. Either way,
he got a room and he needed to advertise. But
do you know who else needs to advertise? Advertisers? It's
literally their job description. And you know who needs to
sell space to advertisers? Me, because that's the way that
(09:19):
the economics of podcast work, besides setting up like crowdfunding,
and I don't want to do that and I'm uncle
zoned medium, and so what we do is advertise, except
actually you can sign up for Cooler Zone Media and
then you don't have to listen to ads. Instead, you
just get to listen to me do long strange ad
transitions twice a day a day an episode, here's ads,
(09:47):
and we're back. So our man. He goes, and he
sets up ads on buses that say, thinking of ending
it all, call Bruce with a phone number. He also
would go to bars in the Tenderloin, which is at
the time it's the nightlife, crime and gay district of
the city, and starts passing out match books with the
(10:09):
hotline's number on them. I've also read that he just
made flyers. He goes around and he starts telling people
about this, like, Hey, there's this number you can call
the number. He got one caller on the very first
night the hotline was open. He got ten callers in
the first week. These days, operators have a lot of
(10:30):
training on what to say and what not to say,
about how to listen. Bernard learned on the job by
listening by offering an anonymous person to talk to and look,
I hate the British as much as the next white
American girl who's pinned most of her personality on being
(10:51):
like a third generation Irish diaspora person. But my god,
are British accents easy on the ears When you're down.
There might be nothing nicer than picking up the phone
and talking to a nice gay priest with a British
accent and a radio announcer's voice. And so it worked.
I mean, he actually held to the end of his
(11:13):
life that he did not. Because everything was anonymous. He
could not tell you that he saved a single life.
And that is not false humility, but it's humility. And
because he absolutely saved a ton of people's lives. And
I'm sure people told him that he wasn't specifically anti suicide.
(11:34):
He said later, quote, you want to kill yourself, kill yourself.
You have every right to do so. But not in
like a flippant, like ahe go out and do this
thing way, but rather like you know, believing in people's
agency kind of way. What he wanted to do and
what he did is he wanted to help people who
wanted a way forward, a way to escape those thoughts,
(11:54):
which is what people who call hotlines are doing. Right.
And over the first fifty years that that hotline was
in place in San Francisco, it's now been sixty years,
we're coming on probably sixty five years. Over the first
fifty years that the hot line was in place, the
suicide rate in San Francisco dropped to half of what
it had been. And it you know, there's no proof
(12:19):
of causality there, right, but there's no reason to doubt
that it was a significant part of that. I suspect
that also, like gay liberation movements and acceptance and things
like that are a very big part of that as well.
But those are all tied in together. We all just
do the work. We can't always measure the work we do,
(12:40):
and sometimes getting lost and trying to measure the work
we do is a distraction. I think sometimes it's best
to just do the work we do. Bernard stuck around
with the hot line for ten years and then he
left because founder syndrome is a real thing. Founders are
often bad at continuing projects indefinitely because once they scale up,
(13:03):
they demand too much control and authority just instinctually, or
as Bernard put it, quote, the people who start things
mustn't stay too long because if you do stay too long,
you will kill it by your own oppression. I just
really like how blunt that is as someone who sometimes
struggles with that. Shout out to my collective mates, thanks
(13:24):
for putting up with me at meetings. By the time
that Bernard left, San Francisco's Suicide Prevention was fielding two
hundred calls a day and they had ten people on
staff and one hundred volunteers. San Francisco's Suicide Prevention as
a model was spreading across the country. He also then,
like in the late sixties, founded the publicly funded radio
(13:46):
station KQED, partly with influence from the BBC. It was
like kind of a like, how do we bring BBC
shows to the United States? The United States radio landscape
is entirely not entirely as pacifica, but it is by
and large not public radio, is largely commercial radio. And
so they're like, well, how do we do it, And like, oh,
why don't we set up a publicly funded radio station, KQED,
(14:09):
And soon KQED became the most listened to radio station
in the country. So then they went on to help
found the National Public Radio Entre Bernard was part of
in nineteen seventy and he was the first chairman of NPR.
And I almost fell down this whole rabbit hole, and
I didn't put it in the script, but basically there
(14:29):
was this whole thing where it was actually very hard
to start NPR because you have all these independent radio
stations and they very much like being independent, and so
actually trying to say like, no, we're all going to
be part of this national thing with this national branding.
There was a lot of pushback and kind of understandably,
we're actually, as we're going to as we talk about
suicide prevention hotlines, we're going to talk about the complicated
(14:51):
nature of creating some of these larger structures without being
against it at all. And I know what you're thinking,
this is isn't an ad break. I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, but Margaret, how this week are you going
to tie suicide prevention hotlines into JRR Tolkien. Well, I'm
(15:15):
proud to tell you that Bernard Mays, one of the
founders of NPR and the founder of suicide Hotlines, not
only adapted Lord of the Rings to radio in nineteen
seventy nine for NPR, but he also voiced Gandolf and
Tom Bombadil for that production. So if you want to
hear this man, you can go find the nineteen seventy
nine production of Lord of the Rings. He became a
(15:37):
college professor in the nineties. I think he started an
LGBT campus group while he was there, and he left
the church, the Anglican Church in nineteen ninety two. I've
seen it said that he became an atheist, but I
don't know if that's quite right, because he actually became
something that I think is more interesting. He became a soupist.
(15:58):
He became the only super He wrote a book called
Escaping God's Closet, The Revelations of a Queer Priest and
his Friends. Quoted by NPR said quote, Bernard revealed why
he ultimately renounced the priesthood and religion and described the interdependence, interaction,
(16:19):
and endless exchange within the universe as the soup. For Bernard,
the inter relationship of all things necessitated a particular efic
that he whimsically dubbed supism. For Bernard, supism was derived
from the belief that love for others, egalitarian government, universal education,
(16:40):
and respect for the planet and all that live upon
it are critical for the continued health, well being, and
survival of the human species. And I like that. I
think it's called Carsonization or something where like every evolution
moves towards crab, if like all plants eventually evolve towards
tree like independently, and all of these things evolve towards
(17:03):
crab independently. Right. You can also see this in the
suv world, where you know, all cars are slowly becoming
smallish SUVs, which is why I call them crabs, and
I'm trying to spread that we should all call the
little four door hatchback SUVs crabs. But I feel like
soupism is kind of the crab of cool people who
(17:25):
did cool stuff religion. This sort of like not a
denial of divinity, but a sort of pantheism because it
maybe I'm just thinking this because it just did the
episode on secret societies and Masons and Illuminati and all
that stuff, and they basically are teaching pantheism but coming
out of a Christian framework, And I feel like seekers
(17:45):
religious seekers usually come up with like, oh, everything is divine.
That's the crab of religion. For good reason. Anyway, our
soupist returned to the rest of the year universe when
he died at eighty five years old in twenty fourteen
from complications from Parkinson's disease. When he died, his close
(18:09):
friends were with him reading him Shakespeare specifically, he died
while they were reading him Sonnet one hundred and sixteen.
And this isn't from a play. It was a separate
poem that Shakespeare wrote, And I'm just going to read
it to you because I'm a sucker and I like
this guy. And this is what people were reading him
as he returned to the soup. Let me not to
(18:33):
the marriage of true minds, admit impediments. Love is not love,
which alters when it alteration, finds or bends with the
remover to remove. Oh No, it is an ever fixed
mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken. It
is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth so unknown.
(18:54):
Although his height be taken, Love's not time's fool, though
wrote lips and cheeks within his bending sickles compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but
bears it out even to the edge of doom. If
this be air upon me proved, I never write, nor
(19:16):
no man ever loved. Yeah, I just love alters not,
you know, but bears out even to the edge of doom,
thick and fucking thin. So it's not surprising at all
to me that the first suicide prevention hotline in the
US was started by a gay man. Queers have always
been on top of caring for one another because we've
(19:38):
always needed mutual aid and solidarity literally in order to survive.
To tie in another recent series of episodes, when we
talked about mutual aid in the Animal Kingdom. We talked
about how in the nineteenth century the geologist, biologist and
anarchist communist Peter Kropok can prove that cooperation is at
least as important of a factor in evolutionist competition, and
(19:58):
that specifically, the harsh the environment, the more animals work
together to survive that environment. So yeah, queers invented this shit.
It's also, though not surprising to me, that he was
a priest. Before there was philosophy, there was theology, before
there was therapy, there was confession. The confession booth isn't historically,
(20:22):
as far as I understand it, a place for punishment
or self flagellation per se, but rather one where you
could talk to someone about how you've been feeling and
acting and how you wish you were feeling and acting instead.
The confession system is not above critique, but that was
and is an important part of its social role. And
(20:44):
I don't know a ton about the Anglican Church to
see the aforementioned built my entire identity around opposition to
everything English, because why would I bother understanding nuance when
I can pick an identity that is vaguely related to
me and carry it too far. I don't know a
ton about the Anglicans, but I do know that they
do confession as well, and San Francisco's suicide prevention is
(21:10):
still around. By nineteen eighty nine, they started an HIV
nightline so that HIV patients who couldn't sleep because the
pain had someone to talk to. And I actually want
to focus on this part of it for a second,
because the modern landscape of suicide prevention hotlines is fairly professionalized, medicalized,
(21:35):
and tied into the emergency response system and therefore police
and things like that. We're going to get a lot
into that, I think, especially in part two of this episode,
but its roots are just I need to be listened to.
I'm in pain, and I want to talk to someone,
(21:58):
ideally someone who can understand, someone who's been in the
same situation or a comparable situation, or has been around
people in this situation before. But I just need to
talk to someone. I can't sleep because I'm hurting, because
I'm dying. When I first read about HIV nightline for
HIV patients wouldn't sleep because of pain, I was like,
that seems related, but not directly related. But the more
(22:20):
I think about it, the more just directly related those
two things are I need someone to listen to me.
I feel like I'm dying and I'm in pain. And
here's to everyone whoever staffed that line. Here's to everyone
who's ever staffed any suicide hotline and just been there
(22:45):
to listen to people, much like you can listen to dads. No,
I feel terrible. I don't like that dad transition. I'm
stuck with it. So are you. I'm sorry I have
failed you, and we're back as far as I can tell.
(23:05):
The San Francisco hotline was the first. It's usually attributed
as the first, but there was one that started roughly
around the same time, probably shortly thereafter. Before the San
Francisco Hotline, some psychologists in Los Angeles partnered with the
National Institute of Mental Health to start the Los Angeles
Suicide Prevention Center. And this is a very different background, right.
(23:31):
This is a research and outreach center and it is
the first one of its kind in the country. They
also started a hotline in nineteen sixty two. This hotline,
they're much more scientific about the whole thing. They collect
anonymous data about the callers, and that has advantages and disadvantages.
I'm actually not trying to come for that model versus
(23:51):
a different model, right, I understand why we use data
to try and make decisions as a society. This led
to the American Association of Suicideology in nineteen sixty eight,
which researched all this stuff, and they started an a
credittion program for crisis centers by nineteen seventy six, which
(24:12):
was necessary because the LA and San Francisco programs kind
of proved how important they were. Although actually we'll get
into it. They didn't necessarily, like statistically prove that, but
they were ideas that people were into. There was no
evidence against them either. It's still very hard to measure
the success of these sorts of things. By nineteen seventy one,
(24:34):
there's two hundred different centers around the US, but while
a lot of them ran hotlines, they tended not to
focus on these hotlines at all. The point of the
phone calls were to screen people for in person consultations,
because I think they're coming from more of the scientific model,
and or they thought that in person consultations were like
(24:55):
you know, oh, you have a medical problem, go see
the doctor, versus like I just fucking need someone to
talk to. It's such a fascinating dichotomy. And like all dichotomies,
it's false and there's like things to be advantages and
disadvantages and oh, I don't want to get as dialectics,
but sometimes two things that seem really opposite. If you
take the things that are good about each other and
(25:17):
the ways that are in conflict, you can come up
with something really beautiful synthesis, as it were for you
theory nerds out there. And then the government, for better
or worse, started to get involved in this stuff. In
the nineteen nineties, the Substance Abuse in Mental Health Services
Administration SAMSUH SAM SAMPSA. I'm gonna call it SAMSAI even
(25:40):
the it's an h in there. They started a new
center for Mental Health Services and started surveying what the
various clinics and crisis centers were up to to try
and come up with a plan. And the federal government
starts getting more involved and things get messy. Don't get
(26:01):
me wrong, I think every volunteer and staffer who works
these lines is a hero, a bonafide cool person who
did cool stuff. But the more these services started getting
tied into governmental framework. The more they started working with
other emergency services, including less savory emergency services aka the police.
(26:22):
If you haven't, you should go back and listen to
Robert Evans and prop doing a very long series called
Behind the Police. It's a subsection of Behind the Bastards,
and it traces the fact that the United States police
come from slave patrols in the US South and then
like bad shit and I can't remember exactly the details
(26:43):
of it, but like different bad shit in the North,
and the police have never gotten better. They are an
instrument of white supremacy. People have attempted various ways of
making them not be that way. I don't think that
they're currently succeeding anyway. So even when they first started
interacting with the state, these emergency services like mental health
(27:05):
as emergency service, it's then tied into other emergency services
like the cops. To say nothing about how things have
gone this year twenty twenty five with the whole fascism thing, well,
actually we're going to say a decent bit about that part.
But later, So in two thousand and one, Congress was like, sure,
we'll give some money to a national hotline to stop suicide.
(27:29):
The idea was and is a single number that people
can call that will direct them to a more local,
specialized organization for help. This is not a bad idea.
And you know, one of these local organizations is San
Francisco's Suicide Prevention. They've been part of this framework for
a long time now. It took a couple of years,
(27:49):
but by two thousand and five, the National Suicide Prevention
Hotline opened and it got forty six thousand calls in
the first year it was open. Soon enough, they start
doing sub sections for people who are like specifically at
risk and or need kind of specific kinds of care
and help. So they partnered with a Department of Veterans
(28:10):
Affairs to add a Press one option for veterans specific counseling,
and then a Press two option for Spanish language help. Eventually,
like decades later, they're going to add a Press three
option for LGBTQ plus specific folks who need help and
want to be able to talk to someone who has
(28:31):
dealt with a similar situation. I can't actually tell you
about the efficacy of this hotline because suicide rates in
the US have been steadily on the rise since the
year two thousand, which is the furthest back. I found
data on the CDC website. There's one exception one year
in the past twenty five years where suicide rates fell
(28:53):
markedly before returning to normal the next year, and that
was the year of Our Lord twenty twenty, which is
not what I would have expected. There have been studies
and studies of studies to determine the efficacy of these hotlines.
Literally the study of study I read has studied hundreds
of studies, but the data isn't conclusive yet. It does
(29:14):
seem to indicate that they help, especially in the short
term and the near long term. It's not that they
don't help long term, it's that it is incredibly hard
to effectively study right. People who call suicide hotlines are
more likely than other people to die by suicide, much
as the same as if you have I don't know Parkinson's,
(29:39):
you're more likely to call a Parkinson's Help hotline than
someone who doesn't, And it doesn't mean that the hotline
is why you die to Parkinson's anyway. That study of
study does show, however, that counselors who've taken the training
course Applied Suicide Intervention Skills train Assist did a better
(30:02):
job than counselors who did not. So there is evidence
that some level of formalization has had positive impacts. I
want to be clear about that because I'm kind of
coming out strong for the like you just want to
talk to a gay Anglican priest a model, but like,
well not just that, I'm just using him as an example.
(30:22):
But there's a lot of different ways to try and
do this. But suicide rates were going up throughout the
twenty first century and have been, and by twenty eighteen
the government was like, all right, we should probably make
this a three digit number instead of a ten digit number.
And by twenty twenty two it happened. Nine eight eight
is the national crisis number. And as soon as it
(30:44):
was a number you could actually remember, nine eight eight,
call volume went up nationally by forty percent. And these
calls are routed to a national network of more than
two hundred crisis centers, many of which started off as
independent hotlines. However, many of them are in life literally
the same building as nine to one one operators and
are very deeply tied into that system. And these independent
(31:07):
hotlines immediately get access to one point five billion dollars
set aside to fund the program. In the first two
years of nine eight eight, it fielded ten million calls
and texts and chats. And yeah, you've still got the
Press one option, which saw just for numbers, for the
fact that these are useful, these separate ones Press one
(31:29):
option and twenty twenty four the Press one option for
Veterans Help saw sixty five thousand calls, the Press two
option for Spanish saw ten thousand calls, and that the
Press three option for LGBTQ plus folks saw thirty seven
thousand calls. But it's tied into that first responder network.
Ostensibly part of nine eight eight's goal and like why
(31:51):
it was set up is to move emergency mental health
away from the police focused nine to one to one
so that fewer cops need to be involved in christ
this intervention. But it's part of the government, so it's
not exactly coming out acab. In exchange for access to
federal funding, these local crisis centers have to agree to
(32:13):
what you could call non consensual intervention. So this thing
that was supposed to mean the police wouldn't get involved
in your crisis gets the police involved, not just ambulances,
although even that's contentious and it brands itself that is
private and confidential if you call it, but it's not.
It talks to the police. I'm going to get into
(32:37):
alternatives in a little bit, but the trans Lifeline, which
is not part of the nine eight eight network, spent
years trying to get transparency out of the nine eight
eight network about how often the police were called and
how often non consensual intervention was done. Most of the
higher up organizations involved in nine eight eight, it's very
complicated SAMSA like basically pay is a grant to another organization,
(33:01):
and then all of these smaller organizations like take part
of it whatever. Most of the higher up organizations involved
in nine eight eight blocked the requests for data from
the people studying it at every turn, including people like
putting in Freedom of Information Act requests. Some of the
local organizations involved in nine eight eight, like the Trevor
Project which supports especially LGBTUTH, were open and forthcoming about
(33:26):
their data and as for what they found the trans
Lifeline researchers. I hate breaking this episode here, but this
is where I'm gonna break it because it's halfway through
my script. As for what they found and what the
trans Lifeline is all about you have to wait until
Wednesday unless you can't wait. I feel this is just
not an OK place to break it. Translfeline does not
(33:48):
do non consensual intervention, and their number in the US
is eight seven seven five six five eight eight six zero.
In Canada it's eight seven seven three three zero six
three sixty six and their hours are every day from
one pm to nine pm Eastern. But again, this is
not an episode about how to get help. This is
(34:09):
not an episode about how to help your friends. This
is an episode about some of the cool people who
try to help people, whether they do it in the
formal structure like nine to eight eight, or whether they
do it in a actually still formal structure, just not
tied into you know, governmental stuff like the trans Lifeline. Anyway,
I hope you all are doing as well as you can,
(34:31):
and I hope y'all are taking care of each other
and telling your friends that you love each other and
doing all those things because you should. Because it's better
to just be earnest and be about what you're about
and care for each other. Right see in a couple days,
(34:54):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stop is a production of
Cool Zone Media. The more podcasts Normal Zone Media. Visit
our website folezonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
M
Host
Margaret Killjoy
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.