Health officials preparing to broaden the reach of a national mental-health crisis line are working to strengthen an overstretched network of call centers that didn’t connect with about one in six callers in recent years, a Wall Street Journal data review showed.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will transition on Saturday to a three-digit number for calls and texts, 988, from a 10-digit number that has operated since 2005 in coordination with local crisis centers. The line’s operators, including the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the nonprofit Vibrant Emotional Health, said they expect an increase in calls to the shorter and more memorable 988 number during the next year. Stress, suffering and disruption of routines during the pandemic has worsened many people’s mental health, clinicians have said.
The network of about 200 call centers that answers calls to the line is already under some strain. Some 1.5 million of 9.2 million calls between 2016 and 2021 were abandoned by callers or disconnected before a counselor could respond, according to data provided by Vibrant and analyzed by the Journal. In 11 states, a majority of calls were routed to one of 13 national backup centers from local centers too overtaxed to answer.
Calls are first routed to local crisis centers based on area code and forwarded to national backup centers if no one is available. Answering locally is preferable, officials said.
“We have knowledge of who’s in the county, who might take their insurance, who isn’t taking new patients right now,” said Sam Johnson, director of behavioral health for the health department in Lake County, Ill., which runs a two-person call center.
Almost three in four calls in Illinois were routed out-of-state from 2016 to 2021, the highest of any state, the Vibrant data show. Nationally, just under 65% of calls to the crisis line were answered in-state in that period.
The Illinois Department of Human Services said a recently opened center will help answer more calls locally. Backed by federal and state funds, the center will have about 100 people answering calls from across the state in addition to centers that serve certain counties, said a department spokesman.
Nationally, some $432 million in federal funding and additional state funding to improve the crisis line will help to cut response times and answer more calls in-state after the 988 number goes live, public-health officials and mental-health advocates said. SAMHSA said that the crisis line was underfunded in the past and that recent investments have already improved wait times and the number of calls and texts answered.
“Is there readiness across the country for 988 to go live and provide the kind of response people want and deserve? No,” said Angela Kimball, an executive at Inseparable, a mental-health advocacy organization. “But are we making progress? Yes, we definitely are.”
The suicide rate in the U.S. increased by 30% from 2000 to 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And while overall rates have declined from a 2018 peak, suicides among groups including children have risen in recent years, CDC data show. The crisis line has helped make people feel less suicidal and hopeless, some studies have suggested; some people said calling saved their life.
Annual call volumes to the current 10-digit line increased by 92% from 2016 to 2021. In Louisiana, the in-state answer rate of calls to the crisis line dropped to 47% in 2021 from 91% six years earlier. “Our call volume was so great that we had to back off a lot of our calls and send them back to the backup centers,” said LaVondra Dobbs, chief executive officer of VIA Link, a crisis center in Louisiana.
Storm Glassheart, 25 years old, said she called the national crisis line as a last resort in 2018 after trying two local crisis lines in Arizona. She said she waited on hold for hours. Then, she said, the call disconnected.
“I followed all the steps. Like, nothing is working,” Ms. Glassheart recalled thinking. “So that must mean that I should die.” She said she tried to kill herself and woke up the next day in a hospital after a friend found her passed out.
Credit: By Brianna Abbott, Jose Luis Martínez and Ryan Tracy
Subject: Patients rights; Call centers; Mental health; Suicides & suicide attempts
Business indexing term: Industry: 56142 : Telephone Call Centers
Location: United States–US; Louisiana; Illinois
Classification: 56142: Telephone Call Centers
Publication title: Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.
First page: A.3
Publication year: 2022
Publication date: Jul 12, 2022
Publisher: Dow Jones & Company Inc
Place of publication: New York, N.Y.
Country of publication: United States, New York, N.Y.
Publication subject: Business And Economics–Banking And Finance
ISSN: 00999660
Source type: Newspaper
Language of publication: English
Document type: News
ProQuest document ID: 2687985760
Document URL: https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/u-s-news-one-six-suicide-hotline-calls-isnt/docview/2687985760/se-2?accountid=3688
Copyright: Copyright 2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Last updated: 2022-07-12
Database: U.S. Newsstream
