Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People who did Cool Stuff.
Speaker 1: Your weekly reminder that even as all the terrible things happen,
Speaker 1: there's people who prevent worse things from happening all the time,
Speaker 1: and that we all rely every day on infrastructure and
Speaker 1: ideas that people have built up over generations and generations.
Speaker 1: And one of those things is the idea of running reruns.
Speaker 1: No one of those things is hotlines. Hotlines might be
Speaker 1: something you take for granted, You're like, oh, that's just
Speaker 1: the hotline for people who are feeling bad, But like
Speaker 1: everything worth anything in this country, this world, it came
Speaker 1: from people working directly with each other to make the
Speaker 1: world a better place. We change things, and systems rush
Speaker 1: to catch up. It's the way it's always been, It's
Speaker 1: the way it will always be. Anyway, this is a
Speaker 1: a rerun because I got sick. Hello and welcome to
Speaker 1: Cool peoplehooded Cool Stuff. Your weekly reminder that when there's
Speaker 1: bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things,
Speaker 1: often succeeding at doing good things. And really it's the
Speaker 1: trying that is the succeeding. That's the subtext of the show.
Speaker 1: I'm your host Margaret Kiljoy and every week I talk
Speaker 1: about coolby boodhed cool stuff. It's right there in the
Speaker 1: title of the show. And why am I vamping instead
Speaker 1: of introducing a guest, Well, it's because there's no guest.
Speaker 1: It's just me. I like to do these episodes every
Speaker 1: now and then. It gives myself a little bit of
Speaker 1: a break. I have to do just as much prep
Speaker 1: work actually, so it's not really much of a break.
Speaker 1: It's just a different way of working. And I crave variety,
Speaker 1: so I like working in different ways at different times.
Speaker 1: So that's why I like to do episodes without a
Speaker 1: guest sometimes. And this week we are going to be
Speaker 1: talking about suicide hotlines to quote the Mighty trent Resnor.
Speaker 1: How are you doing tonight? Having a good time? Ready
Speaker 1: to party? Have fun? Yeah, well that was the last guys,
Speaker 1: wrong fucking band. We're here to have a bad time
Speaker 1: because I don't know. I mean, it's actually hopefully still
Speaker 1: going to be fun. But also I would enjoy going
Speaker 1: to trent Resnor tonight and Chanelle's playing a show, so
Speaker 1: clearly it's not actually a bad time. Sometimes talking about
Speaker 1: super serious stuff or dark stuff is what we like
Speaker 1: to do, and it's important to be upfront right at
Speaker 1: the top. This is not an episode about how to
Speaker 1: help yourself or others deal with suicidal ideation or any
Speaker 1: of that stuff. It is the history episode about people
Speaker 1: who've created structures to help people. And I don't know,
Speaker 1: I find that stuff fascinating and I wanted to read
Speaker 1: about it this week. I'm actually doing all right. By
Speaker 1: the way, this is a thing that a lot of
Speaker 1: my friends struggle with and always have, and so I
Speaker 1: care about those friends, and I don't know, it was
Speaker 1: on my mind, so I wanted to read about it
Speaker 1: this week, And unfortunately it's also on my mind because
Speaker 1: the political situation is making it harder for hotlines for lifelines,
Speaker 1: and it's fucked up and we should be. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of the subtext of a lot of the
Speaker 1: episodes this year has been like stuff that we take
Speaker 1: kind of for granted that the government is trying to
Speaker 1: take away from us now that it's fascist. So this
Speaker 1: is kind of another episode in that vein crisis hotlines,
Speaker 1: you are going to be shocked, absolutely shocked. You're not
Speaker 1: going to be shocked at all to know that crisis
Speaker 1: hotlines in the United States come out of gay culture
Speaker 1: like a lot of our stories, this one starts in
Speaker 1: San Francisco. In fact, it starts tied deeply into another
Speaker 1: one of our recent stories. A few weeks or months back,
Speaker 1: What is Time these Days? I did a series of
Speaker 1: episodes about the founding of public radio and how it
Speaker 1: started in the US and the Bay with PACIFICA Radio.
Speaker 1: I didn't actually carry that story forward into time into NPR,
Speaker 1: but we're going to do that a little bit this
Speaker 1: week because the first suicide hotline was started in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixties by a gay British priest named Bernard Mays,
Speaker 1: who was also the first chairman of National Public Radio.
Speaker 1: He he's such a quintessential cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: I found nothing negative about him in all of the
Speaker 1: shit that I spent researching him, And to be fair,
Speaker 1: I didn't read. He did write an autobiography later in
Speaker 1: his life, and I haven't read that. I've read like
Speaker 1: people talking about it, and a lot of people talking
Speaker 1: about his life. But yeah, I'm not finding the dirt
Speaker 1: on this guy. He just actually seems really genuinely cool
Speaker 1: and interested in a ton of different things in helping people. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, I did say British Bernard Mays was British,
Speaker 1: but we can't hold that against him. No one controls
Speaker 1: how they were born, which in this case was in
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty nine in the aforementioned country of England. He
Speaker 1: went to school at Cambridge studying ancient languages and history
Speaker 1: and worked as a high school teacher teaching those same things.
Speaker 1: And this also means he was a teen young teen
Speaker 1: during World War Two, and I haven't read much about that,
Speaker 1: but that obviously is going to impact your life. Then,
Speaker 1: you know, he's working as a high school teacher and
Speaker 1: he falls in love with this other boy who was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: but what if you joined the church? Though, Bernard went
Speaker 1: and became an Anglican priest. Bernard moved to the US,
Speaker 1: and Bernard himself basically says he got seduced into the church.
Speaker 1: And I think that's really funny because later he's going
Speaker 1: to do a lot of the work to help the
Speaker 1: Anglican Church understand LGBT stuff. He moves to the US
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight, first to Greenwich Village in Manhattan,
Speaker 1: and then he gets himself transferred by the church to
Speaker 1: San Francisco in nineteen sixty. He has been doing radio
Speaker 1: stuff as soon as he gets the US, maybe before then.
Speaker 1: He's the BBC's West Coast correspondent, and he kept filing
Speaker 1: story after story of people dying by suicide. In fact,
Speaker 1: at the time, it was the suicide capital of the
Speaker 1: Western world. The suicide rate there at the time was
Speaker 1: I think roughly into like thirty out of one hundred
Speaker 1: thousand people, which is like twice even what higher numbers
Speaker 1: later are going to be. There's a place with a
Speaker 1: lot of risk of suicide, and I think that that
Speaker 1: has to do a lot with homophobia and things like that.
Speaker 1: So he gets there and he has an idea. It's
Speaker 1: also possible he went to San Francisco specifically to do
Speaker 1: this idea. I've read so many contradictory things because people
Speaker 1: do a lot of myth making around this man, and
Speaker 1: he participates in some of the myth making himself. As
Speaker 1: far as I can tell either way, he's in San Francisco.
Speaker 1: He's like, I want to do something about this. I
Speaker 1: want to start to talk to people who are feeling suicidal.
Speaker 1: He was like, I should use an alias and start
Speaker 1: a hotline. Now, the idea of using hot lines to
Speaker 1: organize like these days, crisis lines are actually some of
Speaker 1: the only like hotlines we really have left. But in
Speaker 1: other parts of the world and in the recent memory
Speaker 1: of the past, you would do things like if you
Speaker 1: wanted to say, for example, like have a radical events calendar,
Speaker 1: you get an answering machine and you'd put, hey, everyone,
Speaker 1: this week, these are the events, and you'd put that
Speaker 1: on the answering machine and then you publicize the number,
Speaker 1: or you know, there have been all kinds of hot
Speaker 1: lines throughout time. There was even a while reading about
Speaker 1: radio in Britain a couple of weeks ago, months ago,
Speaker 1: something like that, there was like a hotline. There was
Speaker 1: a call an anarchist hot line where if you had
Speaker 1: questions about anarchism you could call this hot line. And
Speaker 1: also specifically, queer culture has used hotlines for a very
Speaker 1: long time because one of the things is that like
Speaker 1: queerness when it's not accepted, is a very isolating experience,
Speaker 1: and so people have been using whatever technology is available
Speaker 1: to break that isolation. And it's just so interesting because
Speaker 1: you know, those uses tend to predate crisis hotlines, but
Speaker 1: crisis hotlines are sort of what's left now that there's
Speaker 1: the Internet and all these other things. Anyway, He's like,
Speaker 1: I should use an alias start a hotline. So we
Speaker 1: starts shopping around for a room to rent to run
Speaker 1: the service out of. And there's a couple stories about
Speaker 1: how this went down, and both of them are sort
Speaker 1: of interesting. One of them, the story that he tells himself,
Speaker 1: is that landlord after landlord would turn him down when
Speaker 1: he told them his plans. But then when he told
Speaker 1: his plans to one manager at an apartment place, he
Speaker 1: was like, Hey, I want to start talking to people
Speaker 1: who are considering suicide. And the manager said, you mean
Speaker 1: like this, and he put out his arms and he
Speaker 1: showed the slash marks on his own wrists, and that
Speaker 1: manager rented Bernard the room for half price. Now, the
Speaker 1: organization that he goes on to start San Francisco Suicide Prevention,
Speaker 1: they actually tell a different version of the story than
Speaker 1: he tells. His organization tells the story that the first
Speaker 1: office was in the basement of an apartment building and
Speaker 1: the manager assumed they were an escort service. And I've
Speaker 1: also read that it started in nineteen sixty one, and
Speaker 1: I've read that it started in nineteen sixty two, which
Speaker 1: is I think why most articles just say in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen sixties. Is they probably ran across the same
Speaker 1: thing I did. Either way, he got a room and
Speaker 1: he needed to advertise. But do you know who else
Speaker 1: needs to advertise? Advertisers? It's literally their job description. And
Speaker 1: you know who needs to sell space to advertisers? Me,
Speaker 1: because that's the way that the economics of podcast work,
Speaker 1: besides setting up like crowdfunding, and I don't want to
Speaker 1: do that, and I'm uncle's one medium, and so what
Speaker 1: we do is advertise, except actually you can sign up
Speaker 1: for Cooler Zone Media and then you don't have to
Speaker 1: listen to ads. Instead, you just get to listen to
Speaker 1: me do long, strange ad transitions twice a day a
Speaker 1: day an episode. Here's ads, and we're back, so our man.
Speaker 1: He goes and he sets up ads on buses. That's say,
Speaker 1: thinking of ending it all, call Bruce with a phone number.
Speaker 1: He also would go to bars in the Tenderloin, which
Speaker 1: is at the time it's the nightlife, crime and gay
Speaker 1: district of the city, and starts passing out matchbooks with
Speaker 1: the hot line's number on them. I've also read that
Speaker 1: he just made flyers. He goes around and he starts
Speaker 1: telling people about this, like, hey, there's this number. You
Speaker 1: can call the number. He got one caller on the
Speaker 1: very first night the hotline was open. He got ten
Speaker 1: callers in the first week. These days, operators have a
Speaker 1: lot of training on what to say and what not
Speaker 1: to say, about how to listen. Bernard learned on the
Speaker 1: job by listening by offering an anonymous person to talk to.
Speaker 1: And look, I hate the British as much as the
Speaker 1: next white American girl who's pinned most of her personality
Speaker 1: on being like a third generation Irish diaspora person. But
Speaker 1: my god, are British accents easy on the ears When
Speaker 1: you're feeling down. There might be nothing nicer than picking
Speaker 1: up the phone and talking to a nice gay priest
Speaker 1: with a British accent and a radio announcer's voice. And
Speaker 1: so it worked. I mean, he actually held to the
Speaker 1: end of his life that he did not because everything
Speaker 1: was anonymous. He could not tell you that he saved
Speaker 1: a single life. And that is not false humility, but
Speaker 1: it's humility. And because he absolutely saved a ton of
Speaker 1: people's lives. And I'm sure people told him that he
Speaker 1: wasn't specifically anti suicide. He said later quote, you want
Speaker 1: to kill yourself, kill yourself. You have every right to
Speaker 1: do so, but not in like a flippant like auge,
Speaker 1: go out and do this thing way, but rather like,
Speaker 1: you know, believing in people's agency kind of way. What
Speaker 1: he wanted to do and what he did is he
Speaker 1: wanted to help people who wanted a way forward, a
Speaker 1: way to escape those thoughts, which is what people who
Speaker 1: call hotlines are doing. Right. And over the first fifty
Speaker 1: years that that hotline was in place in San Francisco,
Speaker 1: it's now been sixty years, we're coming on probably sixty
Speaker 1: five years. Over the first fifty years that the hot
Speaker 1: line was in place, the suicide rate in San Francisco
Speaker 1: dropped a half of what it had been. And it
Speaker 1: you know, there's no proof of causality there, right, but
Speaker 1: there's no reason to doubt that it was a significant
Speaker 1: part of that. I suspect that also, like gay liberation
Speaker 1: movements and acceptance and things like that are a very
Speaker 1: big part of that as well. But those are all
Speaker 1: tied in together. We all just do the work. We
Speaker 1: can't always measure the work we do, and sometimes getting
Speaker 1: lost and trying to measure the work we do is
Speaker 1: a distraction. I think sometimes it's best to just do
Speaker 1: the work we do. Bernard stuck around with the hot
Speaker 1: line for ten years, and then he left because founder
Speaker 1: syndrome is a real thing. Founders are often bad at
Speaker 1: continue projects indefinitely because once they scale up, they demand
Speaker 1: too much control and authority just instinctually, or as Bernard
Speaker 1: put it, quote, the people who start things mustn't stay
Speaker 1: too long because if you do stay too long, you
Speaker 1: will kill it by your own oppression. I just really
Speaker 1: like how blunt that is as someone who sometimes struggles
Speaker 1: with that. Shout out to my collective mates, thanks for
Speaker 1: putting up with me at meetings. By the time that
Speaker 1: Bernard left, San Francisco Suicide Prevention was fielding two hundred
Speaker 1: calls a day and they had ten people on staff
Speaker 1: and one hundred volunteers. San Francisco's suicide prevention as a
Speaker 1: model was spreading across the country. He also, then, like
Speaker 1: in the late sixties, founded the publicly funded radio station KQED,
Speaker 1: partly with influence from the BBC. It was like kind
Speaker 1: of a like, how do we bring BBC shows to
Speaker 1: the United States? The United States radio landscape is entirely
Speaker 1: not entirely as PACIFICA but it is by and large
Speaker 1: not public radio, is largely commercial radio, and so they're like, well,
Speaker 1: how do we do it, and like, oh, why don't
Speaker 1: we set up a publicly funded radio station, KQED, And
Speaker 1: soon KQED became the most listened to radio station in
Speaker 1: the country. So then they went on to help found
Speaker 1: the National Public Radio Bernard was part of in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy and he was the first chairman of NPR. And
Speaker 1: I almost felt on this whole rabbit hole, and I
Speaker 1: didn't put it in the script, but basically there was
Speaker 1: this whole thing where it was actually very hard to
Speaker 1: start NPR because you have all these independent radio stations
Speaker 1: and they very much like being independent, and so actually
Speaker 1: trying to say, like, no, we're all going to be
Speaker 1: part of this national thing with this national branding. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of pushback and kind of understandably, we're actually,
Speaker 1: as we're going to as we talk about suicide prevention hotlines,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about the complicated nature of creating
Speaker 1: some of these larger structures without being against it at all.
Speaker 1: And I know what you're thinking, this isn't an ad break.
Speaker 1: I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, but Margaret, how
Speaker 1: this week are you going to tie suicide prevention Hotlines
Speaker 1: into JRR Tolkien. Well, I'm proud to tell you that
Speaker 1: Bernard Mays, one of the founders of NPR and the
Speaker 1: founder of Suicide Hotlines, not only adapted Lord of the
Speaker 1: Rings to radio in nineteen seventy nine for NPR, but
Speaker 1: he also voiced Gandolf and Tom Bombadil for that production.
Speaker 1: So if you want to hear this man, you can
Speaker 1: go find the nineteen seventy nine production of Lord of
Speaker 1: the Rings. He became a college professor in the nineties.
Speaker 1: I think he started an LGBT campus group while he
Speaker 1: was there. And he left the church, the Anglican Church
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety two. I've seen it said that he
Speaker 1: became an atheist, but I don't know if that's quite right,
Speaker 1: because he actually became something that I think is more interesting.
Speaker 1: He became a soupist. He became the only soupist. He
Speaker 1: wrote a book called Escaping God's Closet, The Revelations of
Speaker 1: a Queer Priest and his Friends. Quoted by NPR said
Speaker 1: quote Bernard revealed why he ultimately renounced the priesthood and
Speaker 1: religion and described the interdependence, interaction, and endless exchange within
Speaker 1: the universe as the soup. For Bernard, the inter relationship
Speaker 1: of all things necessitated a particular efic that he whimsically
Speaker 1: dubbed supism. For Bernard, supism was derived from the belief
Speaker 1: that love for others, egalitarian government, universal education, and respect
Speaker 1: for the planet and all that live upon it are
Speaker 1: critical for the continued health, well being and survival of
Speaker 1: the human species. And I like that. I think it's
Speaker 1: called carsonization or something, where like every evolution moves towards
Speaker 1: crab if like all plants eventually evolve towards tree like independently,
Speaker 1: and all of these things evolve towards crab independently. Right.
Speaker 1: You can also see this in the suv world, where
Speaker 1: you know, all cars are slowly becoming smallish SUVs, which
Speaker 1: is why I call them crabs. And I'm trying to
Speaker 1: spread that we should all call the little four door
Speaker 1: hatchback SUVs crabs. But I feel like soupism is kind
Speaker 1: of the crab of cool people who did cool stuff religion.
Speaker 1: This sort of like not a denial of divinity, but
Speaker 1: a sort of pantheism because it maybe I'm just thinking
Speaker 1: this because it just did the episode on secret societies
Speaker 1: and Masons and Illuminati and all that stuff, and they
Speaker 1: basically are teaching pantheism but coming out of a Christian framework.
Speaker 1: And I feel like seekers religious seekers usually come up
Speaker 1: with like, oh, everything is divine. That's the crab of religion.
Speaker 1: For good reason. Anyway, our soupist returned to the rest
Speaker 1: of the universe when he died at eighty five years
Speaker 1: old in twenty fourteen from complications from Parkinson's disease. When
Speaker 1: he died, his close friends were with him reading him
Speaker 1: Shakespeare specifically, he died while they were reading him Sonnet
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixteen. And this isn't from a play.
Speaker 1: It was a separate poem that Shakespeare wrote, And I'm
Speaker 1: just going to read it to you because I'm a
Speaker 1: sucker and I like this guy, and this is what
Speaker 1: people were reading him as he returned to the soup.
Speaker 1: Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments.
Speaker 1: Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds
Speaker 1: or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no, it
Speaker 1: is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and
Speaker 1: is never shaken. It is the star to every wandering bark,
Speaker 1: whose worth so unknown. Although his height be taken, Love's
Speaker 1: not time's fool. The rosy lips and cheeks within his
Speaker 1: bending sickles compass come. Love alters not with his brief
Speaker 1: hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the
Speaker 1: edge of doom. If this be air upon me proved,
Speaker 1: I never write, nor no man ever loved. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just love alters not, you know, but bears out even
Speaker 1: to the edge of doom, thick and fucking thin. So
Speaker 1: it's not surprising at all to me that the first
Speaker 1: suicide prevention hotline in the US was started by a
Speaker 1: gay man. Queers have always been on top of caring
Speaker 1: for one another because we've always needed mutual aid and
Speaker 1: solidarity literally in order to survive. To tie. In another
Speaker 1: recent series of episodes, when we talked about mutual aid
Speaker 1: in the Animal Kingdom, we talked about how in the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century the geologist, biologist and anarchist communist Peter Kropok
Speaker 1: can prove that cooperation is at least as important of
Speaker 1: a factor and evolutionist competition, and that specifically, the harsher
Speaker 1: the environment, the more animals work together to survive that environment.
Speaker 1: So yeah, queers invented this shit. It's also, though not
Speaker 1: surprising to me, that he was a priest. Before there
Speaker 1: was philosophy, there was theology, before there was therapy, there
Speaker 1: was confession. The confession booth isn't, historically, as far as
Speaker 1: I understand it, a place for punishment or self flagellation
Speaker 1: per se, but rather one where you could talk to
Speaker 1: someone about how you've been feeling and acting, and how
Speaker 1: you wish you were feeling and acting instead. The confession
Speaker 1: system is not above critique, but that was and is
Speaker 1: an important part of its social role. And I don't
Speaker 1: know a ton about the Anglican Church. To see, the
Speaker 1: aforementioned built my entire identity around opposition to everything English,
Speaker 1: because why would I bother understanding nuance when I can
Speaker 1: pick an identity that is vaguely related to me and
Speaker 1: carry it too far. I don't know a ton about
Speaker 1: the Anglicans, but I do know that they do confession
Speaker 1: as well. And San Francisco's suicide prevention is still around.
Speaker 1: By nineteen eighty nine, they started an HIV nightline so
Speaker 1: that HIV patients who couldn't sleep because the pain had
Speaker 1: someone to talk to. And I actually want to focus
Speaker 1: on this part of it for a second, because the
Speaker 1: modern landscape of suicide prevention hotlines is fairly professionalized, medicalized,
Speaker 1: and tied into the emergency response system and therefore police
Speaker 1: and things like that. We're going to get a lot
Speaker 1: into that, I think, especially in part two of this episode,
Speaker 1: But its roots are just I need to be listened to.
Speaker 1: I'm in pain and I want to talk to someone,
Speaker 1: ideally someone who can under or stand, someone who's been
Speaker 1: in the same situation or a comparable situation, or has
Speaker 1: been around people in this situation before. But I just
Speaker 1: need to talk to someone. I can't sleep because I'm hurting,
Speaker 1: because I'm dying. When I first read about HIV nightline
Speaker 1: for HIV patients wouldn't sleep because of pain, I was like,
Speaker 1: that seems related, but not directly related. But the more
Speaker 1: I think about it, the more just directly related those
Speaker 1: two things are. I need someone to listen to me.
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm dying and I'm in pain. And
Speaker 1: here's to everyone whoever staffed that line. Here's to everyone
Speaker 1: who's ever staffed any suicide hotline and just been there
Speaker 1: to listen to people. Much like you can listen to dads. No,
Speaker 1: I feel terrible. I don't like that ad transition. I'm
Speaker 1: stuck with it, so are you. I'm sorry I've failed,
Speaker 1: and we're back as far as I can tell. The
Speaker 1: San Francisco Hotline was the first. It's usually attributed as
Speaker 1: the first, but there was one that started roughly around
Speaker 1: the same time, probably shortly thereafter. Before the San Francisco Hotline,
Speaker 1: some psychologists in Los Angeles partnered with the National Institute
Speaker 1: of Mental Health to start the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center.
Speaker 1: And this is a very different background, right. This is
Speaker 1: a research and outreach center and it is the first
Speaker 1: one of its kind in the country. They also started
Speaker 1: a hotline in nineteen sixty two. This hotline, they're much
Speaker 1: more scientific about the whole thing. They collect anonymous data
Speaker 1: about the callers, and that has advantages and disadvantages. I'm
Speaker 1: actually not trying to come for that model versus a
Speaker 1: different model, right, I understand why we use data to
Speaker 1: try and make decisions as a society. This led to
Speaker 1: the American Association of Suicideology in nineteen sixty eight, which
Speaker 1: researched all this stuff and they started an accredittion program
Speaker 1: for crisis centers by nineteen seventy six, which was necessary
Speaker 1: because the LA and San Francisco programs kind of proved
Speaker 1: how important they were. Although actually we'll get into it.
Speaker 1: They didn't necessarily, like statistically prove that, but they were
Speaker 1: ideas that people were into. There was no evidence against
Speaker 1: them either. It's still very hard to measure the success
Speaker 1: of these sorts of things. By nineteen seventy one, there's
Speaker 1: two hundred different centers around the US, but while a
Speaker 1: lot of them ran hotlines, they tended not to focus
Speaker 1: on these hotlines at all. The point of the phone
Speaker 1: calls were to screen people for in person consultations, because
Speaker 1: I think they're coming from more of the scientific model,
Speaker 1: and or they thought that in person consultations were like
Speaker 1: you know, oh, you have a medical problem, go see
Speaker 1: the doctor, versus like I just fucking need someone to
Speaker 1: talk to. It's such a fascinating dichotomy, and like all dichotomies,
Speaker 1: it's false, and there's like things to be advantages and disadvantages,
Speaker 1: and oh, I don't want to get as dialectics, but
Speaker 1: sometimes two things that seem really opposite. If you take
Speaker 1: the things that are good about each other and the
Speaker 1: ways that are in conflict. You can come up with
Speaker 1: something really beautiful synthesis as it were, for you theory
Speaker 1: nerds out there. And then the government, for better or worse,
Speaker 1: started to get involved in this stuff. In the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the Substance Abuse in Mental Health Services Administration SAMSUH SAM SAMPSA,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call it SAMSAI, even the its an h
Speaker 1: in there. They started a new center for Mental Health
Speaker 1: Services and started surveying what the various clinics and crisis
Speaker 1: centers were up to to try and come up with
Speaker 1: a plan, and the federal government starts getting more involved
Speaker 1: and things get Don't get me wrong, I think every
Speaker 1: volunteer in staffer who works these lines is a hero,
Speaker 1: a bonafide cool person who did cool stuff. But the
Speaker 1: more these services started getting tied into governmental framework, the
Speaker 1: more they started working with other emergency services, including less
Speaker 1: savory emergency services aka the police. If you haven't, you
Speaker 1: should go back and listen to Robert Evans and prop
Speaker 1: doing a very long series called Behind the Police. It's
Speaker 1: a subsection of Behind the Bastards, and it traces the
Speaker 1: fact that the United States police come from slave patrols
Speaker 1: in the US South and then like bad shit and
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly the details of it, but like
Speaker 1: different bad shit in the North, and the police have
Speaker 1: never gotten better. They are an instrument of white supremacy.
Speaker 1: People have attempted various ways of making them not be
Speaker 1: that way. I don't think that they're currently succeeding anyway.
Speaker 1: So even when they first started interacting with the state,
Speaker 1: these emergency services like mental health as emergency service, it's
Speaker 1: then tied into other emergency services like the cops. To
Speaker 1: say nothing about how things have gone this year twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five with the whole fascism thing, well, actually we're
Speaker 1: going to say a decent bit about that part. But later,
Speaker 1: so in two thousand and one, Congress was like, sure,
Speaker 1: we'll give some money to a national hotline to stop suicide.
Speaker 1: The idea was and is, a single number that people
Speaker 1: can call that will direct them to a more local,
Speaker 1: specialized organization for help. This is not a bad idea.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of these local organizations is San
Speaker 1: Francisco's Suicide Prevention. They've been part of this framework for
Speaker 1: a long time now. It took a couple of years,
Speaker 1: but By two thousand and five, the National Suicide Prevention
Speaker 1: Hotline opened, and it got forty six thousand calls in
Speaker 1: the first year it was open. Soon enough, they started
Speaker 1: doing sub sections for people who are like specifically at
Speaker 1: risk and or need kind of specific kinds of care
Speaker 1: and help. So they partnered with a Department of Veterans
Speaker 1: Affairs to add a Press one option for veterans specific counseling,
Speaker 1: and then a Press two option for Spanish language help. Eventually,
Speaker 1: like decades later, they're going to add a Press three
Speaker 1: option for LGBTQ plus specific folks who need help and
Speaker 1: want to be able to talk to someone who has
Speaker 1: dealt with a similar situation. I can't actually tell you
Speaker 1: about the efficacy of this hotline because suicide rates in
Speaker 1: the US have been steadily on the rise since the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, which is the furthest back I found
Speaker 1: data on the CDC website. There's one exception one year
Speaker 1: in the past twenty five years where suicide rates fell
Speaker 1: markedly before returning to normal the next year, and that
Speaker 1: was the year of Our Lord twenty twenty, which is
Speaker 1: not what I would have expected. There have been studies
Speaker 1: and studies of studies to determine the efficacy of these hotlines. Literally,
Speaker 1: the study of study I read has studied hundreds of studies,
Speaker 1: but the data isn't conclusive yet. It does seem to
Speaker 1: indicate that they help, especially in the short term and
Speaker 1: the near long term. It's not that they don't help
Speaker 1: long term, it's that it is incredibly hard to effectively study. Right,
Speaker 1: people who call suicide hotlines are more likely than other
Speaker 1: people to die by suicide. Much is the same as
Speaker 1: if you have I don't know Parkinson's, you're more likely
Speaker 1: to call a Parkinson's Help hotline than someone who doesn't,
Speaker 1: And it doesn't mean that the hotline is why you
Speaker 1: die to Parkinson's anyway. That study of study does show, however,
Speaker 1: that counselors who've taken the training course Applied Suicide Intervention
Speaker 1: Skills Training Assist did a better job than counselors who
Speaker 1: did not, So there is evidence that some level of
Speaker 1: formalization has had positive impacts. I want to be clear
Speaker 1: about that because I'm kind of coming out strong for
Speaker 1: the like you just want to talk to a gay
Speaker 1: Anglican priest a model, but like, well, not just that,
Speaker 1: I'm just using them as an example. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different ways to try and do this. But
Speaker 1: suicide rates were going up throughout the twenty first century
Speaker 1: and have been, and by twenty eighteen the government was like,
Speaker 1: all right, we should probably make this a three digit
Speaker 1: number instead of a ten digit number. And by twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two it happened nine eight eight is the national
Speaker 1: crisis number. And as soon as it was a number
Speaker 1: you could actually remember, nine eight eight, call volume went
Speaker 1: up nationally by forty percent. And these calls are routed
Speaker 1: to a national network of more than two hundred crisis centers,
Speaker 1: many of which started off as independent hotlines. However, many
Speaker 1: of them are in literally the same building as nine
Speaker 1: to one one operators and are very deeply tied into
Speaker 1: that system. And these independent hotlines immediately get access to
Speaker 1: one point five billion dollars set aside to fund the program.
Speaker 1: In the first two years of nine eight eight it
Speaker 1: fielded ten million calls and texts and chats. And yeah,
Speaker 1: you've still got the Press one option, which saw just
Speaker 1: for numbers, for the fact that these are useful, these
Speaker 1: separate ones Press one option. In twenty twenty four, the
Speaker 1: Press one option for veterans help saw sixty five thousand calls.
Speaker 1: The Press two option for Spanish saw ten thousand calls,
Speaker 1: and they had the Press three option for LGBTQ plus
Speaker 1: folks saw thirty seven thousand calls. But it's tied into
Speaker 1: that first responder network. Ostensibly, part of nine eight eight's
Speaker 1: goal and like why it was set up, is to
Speaker 1: move emergency mental health away from the police focused nine
Speaker 1: to one to one so that fewer cops need to
Speaker 1: be in crisis intervention. But it's part of the government,
Speaker 1: so it's not exactly coming out acab. In exchange for
Speaker 1: access to federal funding, these local crisis centers have to
Speaker 1: agree to what you could call non consensual intervention. So
Speaker 1: this thing that was supposed to mean the police wouldn't
Speaker 1: get involved in your crisis gets the police involved, not
Speaker 1: just ambulances, although even that's contentious and it brands itself
Speaker 1: that is private and confidential if you call it, but
Speaker 1: it's not. It talks to the police. I'm going to
Speaker 1: get into alternatives in a little bit, but the trans Lifeline,
Speaker 1: which is not part of the nine eight eight network,
Speaker 1: spent years trying to get transparency out of the nine
Speaker 1: eight eight network about how often the police were called,
Speaker 1: and how often non consensual intervention was done. Most of
Speaker 1: the higher up organizations involved in nine eight eight it's
Speaker 1: very complicated. SAMSA like basically pays a grant to another
Speaker 1: organization and then all of these smaller organizations like take
Speaker 1: part of it whatever. Most of the higher up organizations
Speaker 1: involved in nine eight eight blocked the requests for data
Speaker 1: from the people studying it at every turn, including people
Speaker 1: like putting in Freedom of Information Act requests. Some of
Speaker 1: the local organizations involved in nine eight eight, like the
Speaker 1: Trevor Project, which supports especially LGBT youth, were open and
Speaker 1: forthcoming about their data and as for what they found
Speaker 1: the trans Lifeline researchers. I hate breaking this episode here,
Speaker 1: but this is where I'm going to break it because
Speaker 1: it's halfway through my script. As for what they found
Speaker 1: and what the trans Lifeline is all about, you have
Speaker 1: to wait until Wednesday unless you can't wait. I feel
Speaker 1: this is just not an okay place to break it.
Speaker 1: Translfeline does not do non contenual intervention and their number
Speaker 1: in the US is eight seven seven five six five
Speaker 1: eight eight six zero. In Canada it's eight seven seven
Speaker 1: three three zero six three sixty six and their hours
Speaker 1: are every day from one pm to nine pm Eastern.
Speaker 1: But again, this is not an episode about how to
Speaker 1: get help. This is not an episode about how to
Speaker 1: help your friends. This is an episode about some of
Speaker 1: the cool people who try to help people, whether they
Speaker 1: do it in the formal structure like nine eight eight,
Speaker 1: or whether they do it in a actually still formal
Speaker 1: structure just not tied into you know, governmental stuff like
Speaker 1: the trans lifeline. Anyway, I hope you all are doing
Speaker 1: as well as you can, and I hope y'all are
Speaker 1: taking care of each other and telling your friends that
Speaker 1: you love each other and doing all those things because
Speaker 1: you should. Because it's better to just be earnest and
Speaker 1: be about what you're about and care for each other.
Speaker 1: Right see a couple of days Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stop is a production of cool Zone Media. More podcast.
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