Crisis Hotlines: Of Course Queers Invented Them, Part Two

Margaret talks to you about the history of suicide prevention hotlines and the complications of state intervention in emergency mental health care.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that billions of us make the world
better every day by trying really fucking hard to make
the world better in ways big and small. By I'm
your host, Margare Kiljoy. This is a show about cool
people who did cool stuff in history, and we always
talk about these like big actions, you know, this huge

(00:24):
movement that had a revolution, or this individual who accomplished
all of these things. You know, we talked about like
the man who started suicide crisis hotlines, right, but like
there's so many, so many, so many people more involved
in that project. But even more than that, there's so
many more people involved in the basic project of hearing
your friends talk about how they're feeling without prejudice and

(00:47):
without calling the cops on them. You know, Like that
is a thing that we can give to each other
every single day and happens every single day all around
the world, is that we help each other. Because one
of the things that I've learned by researching history is that, look,
I know that this sounds bad, but I mean in
a positive way. There's no bottom to the amount of

(01:09):
suffering that could be happening, right now, right, Like you
just you read about times in history where like things
happened and that were really bad, and then you read
about other times in history where things happened they were
even worse, and you're like, there's just like actually no bottom,
there is no floor, and so it feels like we're
not winning, when in fact we are. It feels like
we're not winning because we haven't achieved our whatever your

(01:31):
utopian dream is, right, but we instead stopped an infinite
amount of suffering. Even though we haven't stopped all the suffering,
we have to keep working. We'll never fully win, right,
But instead we prove that we can have worthwhile and
meaningful lives by the big and small ways that we

(01:53):
work to help each other. That's my grand standing. Hopefully
you're up for some grand standing, because this is an
episode about suicide prevention and specifically the crisis hotlines that
are staffed by so many people who do so much
work to try to help people every single day. And

(02:13):
you know, so hopefully you knew that getting into it
that I was gonna be pretty fucking earnest and talking
about some sad shit like suicide on this particular episode. Anyway,
there's no guest. It's just me and you, just a
little private conversation between the two of us, just two

(02:35):
of us. You're the only listener, which just kind of wild. Actually,
if you think about it, you should really tell your
friends about the show, because it's kind of weird that
I only have one listener and it's you, dear listener.
You think I would know your name since you're the
only listener, but I don't. Last time on Monday, we
talked about Bernard Mays, who set up the first suicide

(02:57):
prevention hotline in the United States in either nineteen sixty
one or nineteen sixty two, and the sources disagree, and
we talked about how it became nine to eight eight,
the current crisis hotline that is available to anyone in
the United States that unfortunately does call the cops. And
where we left our cliffhanger was that trans Lifeline, who

(03:20):
does not do non consensual intervention, had put out a report.
There's a lot of names on this report. They put
a lot of work into it over the course of years.
The report came out in twenty twenty four. You'd read
it on their website linked to it. Among the many
sources in the show, notes even more sources than usual
this particular week. Actually want to talk about that for

(03:40):
a second. I swear I'm going to get into my
own script and end the cliffhanger you're on, But I
want to talk about like my own nervousness around this episode,
because this is a topic I take very seriously, but
I'm not an expert in and the ways that we
talk about this kind of stuff does matter. I read
a decent number of stuff about like guidelines for journalists
when talking about suicide, you know, and how to try

(04:03):
to handle this kind of thing responsibly, and it's very hard.
The reason I want to talk about this part of
it is because I'm going to be critical of nine
eight eight as an infrastructure right now, while I'm also
incredibly grateful for the work that it does right and
I'm not going to tell people not to call it
because a lot of the alternatives are too underfunded and

(04:25):
they're not as successful in certain ways, like don't have
enough people to answer the phone, you know. And it's
good that we try to do this thing. It's just
the framework it's embedded within is very dangerous and there's
a lot of problems with it, and so I mean
this as a loving critique, and it's not even necessarily
my critique. A lot of it's coming from trans Lifeline,

(04:45):
who also mean it as a loving critique. And I
was really impressed with the language that they constantly use
when they're critical of nine eight eight. They're not saying like, oh,
those people love cops in or boot liquors and we're
the best, you know. Instead they're like, hey, we gotta try,
We got to try to be better. We got to
try to get the police out of our communities to

(05:05):
keep ourselves safe, and we've got to you know, care
for each other. But I don't know, I was just
I was pretty impressed with how they talk about it anyway.
Trans Lifelines report, based on years of research, puts their
best guess that on average, cops are dispatched for three

(05:25):
point six percent of nine eight eight calls, which is
higher than the one point nine percent of calls that
lead to emergency medical services being called, which means you're
almost twice as likely to have the cops called on
you as an ambulance. The same report says that callers
who had non voluntary services dispatched on them included reports

(05:47):
of quote, police violence, discrimination, involuntary hospitalization, forced medication, and
physical and sexual assault. And at first glance, you might think, well,
what sort of makes sense to call an ambulance on
someone who's dying, whether they ask for it or not. Right, Like,
if I'm god, this happened once. I was like walking

(06:08):
down the street and like a bicyclist got hit by
a car in front of me. I just called the
fucking ambulance. I didn't be like, hey, buddy, you want
an ambulance, Yay, nay, how you feel about that? I
was just like, fuck, I'm calling an ambulance. That man
just got hit by a car, you know, And that
makes sense to me, right. I don't want to get
into the ethics of intervening in suicide because it's an

(06:30):
incredibly charged debate that people's personal, moral, philosophical, and theological
positions are deeply intertwined with. But there's obviously a reason
many people might want to call the ambulance if someone
is dying for whatever reason. But the thing is a
lifeline that can call the cops on you based on
what you say is just a fundamentally different thing than

(06:52):
a crisis line where you can be honest everyone. I
know is used to lying to doctors and therapists in
order to navigate the strange beer biocracy that permeates our world. Right, Like,
I know people who don't go to therapy because therapists
are mandated reporters, and they're like, what's the point of
going to a therapist? I can't be honest to You

(07:14):
shouldn't have to do that when you're calling a lifeline.
You shouldn't have to play games around how you want
to answer specific questions based on what you're hoping the
outcome will be. I actually think that there's a way
from this to understand the fundamental problem with like law
as a framework with which to try to build a
positive society. But knowing that the police might be called

(07:38):
means that people who call, if they choose to call
it all can't be honest. It's a fucking suicide hotline,
and if you call, they ask have you had any
suicidal thoughts in the past few days? And if you
say yes, they have to run through the script to
figure out if you're an immediate threat, and if you are,
they call emergency services, usually the cops. Isn't this defeating

(08:02):
the whole point of a hotline? Right, Like not everyone
who calls this as having suicidal thoughts, but that's like
it's purpose. You know. You also get asked have you
taken any action to harm yourself today? And this conflates
self harm with suicide, which is I think a fundamental
misunderstanding of the ways in which people hurt themselves. This

(08:23):
study that was put together by trans Lifeline has a
lot of interviews with people who have had these experiences.
One participant in the study about nine eight eight said quote,
of course I felt like hurting myself. Of course I
want to be honest and to be able to talk
about those feelings. I think it would be really helpful
for me to have acknowledged how I was actually feeling

(08:44):
in those moments. But I just know that if you
say yes to those questions about self harm, those questions
aren't to have a supportive conversation. It's like those questions
are to involuntarily hospitalize you, or call the police on you,
or do something that isn't helpful and is really traumatizing
and harmful. Another participant wrote, it becomes about managing the

(09:07):
operators emotions and their concerns. It also becomes about are
they going to flag me up the line to their supervisor.
Do I have to worry about someone coming to my location?
Do I have to worry about the cops being called?
Am I going to be able to stay in my
own home and keep my liberty? Also, between twenty nineteen

(09:28):
and twenty twenty one, the police killed at least one
hundred and seventy eight people in the United States during
wellness checks. These are not nine eight eight specific numbers.
That's just the number of people killed by police in
between twenty nineteen and twenty twenty one, and wellness checks specifically.
It's good that there is an alternative to calling the cops.

(09:49):
I'm certain that separating out nine eight eight from nine
to one to one will overall reduce the number of
people killed by police during wellness checks. And I'm not
trying to say no one should ever call hotlines associated
with nine eight eight. It's just it's trickier than it
needs to be. Unfortunately, a lot of the alternatives are
underfunded and overwhelmed, and frankly, their staff is sometimes less

(10:10):
likely to be as consistently trained. It's just that nine
eight eight is not so detached from the police as
it presumably should be. This is a long way from
calling a nice BBC broadcaster who will listen to you
without judgment. But do you know what, it's not a
long way from, Actually, it is a really long way
from This is really a stretch. I'm just really stretching
here to try and try and find a glimmer of

(10:32):
connection between the script that I'm reading these advertisers, and
I really appreciate you all coming along with me on
that glorious big stretch. Here's ads and Rebecca, I don't
work in suicide prevention. I am not a social worker.

(10:54):
To me, I can see the value in both evidence
based attempts to reduce the number of deaths by suicide
and also just creating platforms so that people who are
suffering can talk to people and be heard, not even
necessarily seen stopping them as the sole purpose, right, but
maybe listening to them. And I think that because I

(11:18):
think it'll reduce the number of suicides. I'm not a whatever.
I'm going to tranking my own opinions out of this
as much as possible. Obviously I have strong opinions about
the way all this interacts with police. But yeah, nine
eight eight seems to me like a perfect example of
taking a really good idea and by relying on the
work of really good people doing something kind of sketchy
by tying it into the government. The trans Lifelines report

(11:41):
says that nine eight eight quote represents an expansion of
location tracking capabilities and non consensual practices in social support services,
disregarding the voices of hotline users, psychiatric survivors, human rights organizations,
and crisis care experts who condemned the practice of non
can central intervention. So these days, if you go to

(12:03):
San Francisco's Suicide Prevention's website and go to their fact
and click on anonymity, they say, quote, the only times
we lift confidentiality are in times of immediate physical danger,
in which case we will only contact emergency services. And
that's not anonymity. I don't want to say that no

(12:27):
organization should work with the government, because if there's one
thing that this administration has reminded us, it's that there
are good things that the government is the one doing.
We remember this because the government is currently systematically stripping
all of its own good qualities away. And so in
July twenty twenty five, the nine eight eight Suicide and

(12:48):
Crisis Hotline dismantled its LGBTQ plus services. They explain this
with perhaps the single most cursed sentence I have ever read,
and I'm so sorry I'm going to say it to
you now. Quote the nine eight eight Suicide and Crisis
Lifeline will no longer silo LGB plus Youth Services also

(13:10):
known as the Press three option, to focus on serving
all help seekers, including those previously served through the Press
three option. Where do I begin, Well, it will no
longer silo US, as if we should be grateful that
we're no longer being kept away from everyone else, even
though obviously the purpose of that is so that we
can reach people who are specifically trained and or have

(13:32):
the similar experiences us. And no one literally no one
good says LGB or LGB plus, the T and the
Q have been purposefully removed because we literally don't exist
in this government's view. Now, of course, this language doesn't

(13:53):
filter down to members of nine eight eight. The fact
that nine eight eight is saying this doesn't mean that
its members share these opinions or will act in that way.
Individual lifelines continue to describe themselves as they wish, but
they do all have to commit to nonconsensual intervention after
nine eight eight cut Queer specific care out of its services.

(14:17):
Trans Lifeline, who are the people who wrote that critical
report of nine eight eight said quote Through our advocacy efforts,
we have recognized that the well meaning folks at nine
eight eight have made improvements to their work and become
more sensitive to the needs of our community. We are
deeply disappointed that they no longer have the opportunity to
continue growing their understanding and service to our community. I

(14:40):
wish I knew what nine eight eight was doing to
improve themselves after that report, but of course any hard
work they'd done was destroyed by the new administration, who,
in their reverse Midas way, turn everything they touch into shit.
But importantly, there are lifelines that are not part of
the nine eight eight project that specifically do not call
them police. I'm going to focus on trans Lifeline, but

(15:02):
just to shout out some of the other ones. There's
Black Line at one eight hundred six oh four five
eight four one, which prioritizes BIPOC and LGBTQ plus folks.
There's the Wildflower Alliance Peter Support Line at one eight
eight eight four oh seven four five one five, which
is a warm line for not as much crisis. There's

(15:25):
the Fireside Project at one six two three two five
zero seven three nine three, which is for people dealing
with mental health during and after psychedelic experiences. There's strong
Heart's Native Helpline at one eight four four seven six
two eight four eight three, which is for Indigenous folks
dealing with intimate partner or sexual violence. And there's trans Lifeline,

(15:50):
which grew out of the Transgender Day of Remembrance. More
like this, transgender remembers that she has to pivot to
ads and Rebecca and I feel as though I have
cursed myself with these ad transitions, because the Trends Day
of Remembrance is not about remembering ads. It is about

(16:12):
remembering a thirty four year old black trans woman named
Rita Hester and all of the other trans people who've
had their lives ended by violence. Rita Hester died in
nineteen ninety eight. She was born in nineteen sixty three
in Hartford, Connecticut, and she was a girl from the jump.
She knew she was Rita pretty much right away, according

(16:32):
to her sister. Her family supported her, even if they
didn't always get her pronouns right, which is an experience
familiar to plenty of trans people. Rita moved to Boston
in her twenties and started hanging out in the rock scene,
going to drag bars, living life to the fullest. She
was also a sex worker, which is left out of
every almost every account of her life. A shout out

(16:55):
to Them magazine, who was actually willing to say what
Rita did for work, because violence against trans people is ignored,
violence against black trans people is ignored, violence against sex workers,
and especially black trans sex workers is ignored. Someone could
not handle Rita living her life to the fullest and
stabbed her to death. She was dead, named and misgendered

(17:17):
an article after article after she died. Her killer was
never found, though two white men were seen leaving the
building that night, and her white boyfriend simply disappeared after
she died. No one heard from him ever. Again, the
most likely thing is that she took home a white
man or two from the bar and they killed her.

(17:38):
None of this, of course, none of this sort of
violence is new. I don't expect to I have to
explain to my listeners, but trans people, especially trans women
of color, especially trans women of color who are sex workers,
are murdered at a terrifyingly disproportionate rate. People have refused
to let Rita Hester's name disappear from history. Her mother, Kathleen,

(17:58):
never stopped fighting, and a trans woman named Gwendolen Smith
soon put up a website called Remembering Are Dead that
within a year became the Transgender Day of Remembrance, which
is November twentieth every year. Murderers with knives aren't the
only folks who kill trans people. Sometimes, systemic poverty, discrimination,

(18:19):
lack of access to medical care, and all those compounding
factors work together to kill trans people through suicide. So
after the trans Day of Remembrance in twenty fourteen, some
folks got together to start the trans Lifeline, a suicide
hotline for trans people staffed by trans people. They started

(18:39):
it based on three principles. One all operators must be trans.
Two peer support from shared lived experiences as vital. And
three they don't call emergency services without the caller requesting that. Now,
to be very clear or to be very specific, there
actually are because I like being like ah, these other

(19:01):
people will call the emergency services. Trans Lifeline can also
call emergency services depending There are three reasons why trans
Lifeline might call someone first is if you ask. Second,
if there's a credible threat to a third party, so
not like I'm going to kill myself, but I'm going
to kill this other guy, or as laws require, if

(19:22):
there's proof of child abuse. They've written a lot about
why they don't do non consensual intervention to quote them quote.
In October twenty fifteen, trans Lifeline surveyed about eight hundred
trans people across the United States about their experiences with
suicide hotline use. Approximately seventy percent of the respondents specified

(19:43):
that they felt unsafe calling a hotline while in crisis.
Approximately a quarter of respondents stated that they had interacted
with law enforcement or emergency personnel due to a crisis call.
One in five had been placed in an involuntary psychiatric hold.
Because lifelines don't work if people are afraid to call them.

(20:06):
They don't work if people don't trust the people they're
talking to. Trans people, in particular distrust the police, but
also all of the other various services that might be called.
Because we are routinely denied care or mistreated, like just
on a really really regular basis, interacting with legal frameworks

(20:27):
is often really complicated for us because we don't know
who's a bigot. Our paperwork doesn't always match our names
and presentations. And it's not just like, oh it hurts
our feelings to be misgendered. No, they do violence to you.
Sometimes they deny you basic human shit. If you're listening
to the show, you probably kind of know these things.

(20:50):
And I don't need a grandstand. But also, we are
twice as likely to live below the poverty line as
the cispopulation, and people sure don't want to pay any
ambulance bills. And finally, to quote trans Lifeline again, quote
for many in our community, chronic suicidal ideation is a

(21:11):
response to trauma and can be managed. So we want
to talk to people who understand that, right, which includes
theoretically plenty of people who are SIS who also have
a as a response to trauma. Like, you know, certain
thoughts are just like ever all that far away from them,
And when we can't talk about that, I don't want

(21:33):
to wee this actually because this is not my experience
as a transperson, but it is the experience of so
many people. I love. When people can't talk about the
fact that those thoughts are just kind of never that
far away, it makes it harder for them to like
process them in functional and useful ways, and it I

(21:55):
don't know. I don't have numbers of this, but it
sure seems like it puts them in more danger, you know.
And so trans Lifeline they set up and they start
doing their work and they're still around. They also, within
a couple of years, set up a micro grant project
which provides small grants for trans people to cover the
cost of name and ID paperwork, which is cool as hell.

(22:18):
It's very complicated, like whether or not it's a complicated
threat analysis, but people whether they should change their name
and ID. Some of it has to do with dysphoria
and euphoria, round gender and presentation, and some of it
has to do just with safety. So some of it
has to do with like it sure would be nice
if my passport looked like me, right, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (22:41):
Now.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
The trans Lifeline isn't perfect either, But the things that
are messy about it are so messy to research. Oh
my lord, I like researching history. That's like history happened
in historical times. Ideally the number should start with a one,

(23:03):
or there should be before the twenty first century. That's
what I like. Current events are messier they have more
moving parts. More raw data is usually available. But I'm
not a historian. I'm a pop historian. I don't do
the more than I have to the raw processing of
stuff to find out what the story is. If you
research trans Lifeline like I spent so much of this

(23:26):
week trying to do, you're going to see a lot
of people talking shit about it on the internet. Some
of this stuff is undoubtedly true. The two founders of
the trans Lifeline, I'm not naming because I just their
names are dragged enough and I don't know if we'll
get to it. The two founders of the trans Lifeline
were asked to leave the project in twenty seventeen after

(23:48):
more than three hundred thousand dollars in funds was found
to be misappropriated. Translfeline wrote quote, there had been significant
spending of trans Lifeline funds outside the scope of our
current budget. Since that time, the project has put a
large amount of effort into financial transparency. All of their

(24:08):
numbers and reports, their impact reports, all of these things
are publicly available. They're also five to one C three,
so a lot of things are publicly available no matter what.
I am not certain, however, what happened to that three
hundred thousand dollars. There are several accounts of what it
was online the Okham's raiser. The most likely thing is

(24:29):
they probably just fucking spent it. I don't know, but
most discussions about it say it was spent on projects
that just wouldn't qualify as five to one C three
projects that were not approved by the board, possibly on
bail and legal protections for various trans people who are incarcerated.
That's like the thing I found hints of more information

(24:49):
might be available, but I tried. This is what I
came up with, and if they did that, I don't know. Man,
good trans prisoners need support. But then again, an early
major funder of the project of trans Lifeline said explicitly
that she was defrauded, So maybe they just spent it.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (25:10):
Again, these are people who haven't been involved in the
project for eight years. The other thing is the way
that this misappropriation was discovered, Well, fucking Kiwi Farms takes
credit for it. This is probably the first time I've
said Kiwi Farms on this show, and I'm sad I
have to do it. If you don't know what Kiwi
Farms is I am glad and I am sorry to

(25:33):
do this too you. Kiwi Farms is a troll community
that seeks to drive trans people to suicide that brags
of their kill count. They specifically weaponize the Internet and
trolling and all of these things to try to kill us.
Kiwi Farms is bad, and they are the ones who

(25:55):
take credit for discovering the misappropriation of funds. Doesn't mean
that the funds weren't misappropriated. It just means that was
brought to people's attention by people who want to destroy
trans Lifeline because they want us to not have help,
because they want us to die. When I tried to
research the current state of trans Lifeline, I found a

(26:17):
lot of people talking about it on various forums like Reddit,
and a lot of those people didn't seem to be
totally on the level. In fact, a lot of them
are saying phrases the same as each other. They were
saying these phrases basically saying like trans Lifeline is a scam,
and a lot of the specific phrasing I also found

(26:40):
in various reports from Kiwi Farms about how it is
successfully exposed the embezzlement of the funds. So there's sure
is an implication that at least some of the people
who are talking shit about trans Lifeline on the internet
in forums are terminally online murderers who are trying to

(27:01):
kill us by destroying trans Lifeline. But just because people
are against it, God, it's just the waters are muddy
as hell. There do seem to be a lot of
people saying that they're having trouble getting through to trans Lifeline.
Other people say, yeah, when I did get through, I
spent two and a half hours talking to a counselor

(27:21):
about our shared experiences and it turned everything around for me,
and I suspect the most likely situation is this trans
Lifeline does not have a large budget. Now they get
these like fairly big name donations and like, you know, oh,
twenty thousand dollars was raised by this, like you know,
a Twitch streamer or those protect the Dolls shirts that

(27:44):
people were wearing, including like Pedro Pascal and stuff, or
like fundraisers for trans Lifeline, and that rules, and that money,
when it's raised, it goes a long way with like
a scrappy thing. But twenty thousand dollars here and there
has nothing on the one point, five billion dollars available
to nine eight eight services. There are only so many volunteers,

(28:06):
and of course they only hire trans counselors, which limits
their pool further and unfortunately, demand for services trans counseling
it's skyrocketing, and it just keeps skyrocketing. People are like, oh,
it's skyrocketed in twenty eighteen after this or that anti
trans law, well like man twenty eighteen sounds like a

(28:27):
little dream fairy land compared to twenty twenty five in America,
And there are studies that show causality between anti trans
legislation and trans suicidality. Everyone I know is struggling one
way or another right now. And what's more, the anti
trans and more broadly anti LGBTQ plus language that nine

(28:48):
eight eight has adopted is likely pushing more people towards
an already overwhelmed system. The state has never been much
of an ally to trans people, but with the states
captured by fascism, it's never been more important for us
to have resources that are independent, even if it's messy. Again,
though nine eight eight is also still around and trans

(29:11):
people can use it. It is complicated, but the people
who work it do good things. I am not a
social worker. I'm a fiction writer and a pop historian.
I'm going to disclaim that over and over and over
again throughout this episode. I don't know what to tell
you if you're struggling. I can tell you that you
should reach out for help, though, and that it's available.

(29:33):
The trans Lifeline 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 six
six and their hours are every day from one pm
to nine pm Eastern. Talk to your friends and don't

(29:53):
judge your friends. You talk to you and I don't know.
Remember that everything changes. The way you're feeling right now
is not how you always feel, and it's not how
you've always felt, even if it's really hard to remember
that in the moment. I want all of us to win.
I want all of us to get to stand side

(30:14):
by side together against this nightmare. And yeah, good luck,
take care of each other.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
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