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Inside an office building in downtown Sacramento, about half a dozen employees are busy in a call center, listening and responding 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, it is not a sales activity. These highly trained employees and volunteers operate Wellspace Health’s Suicide Prevention Hotline in a whopping 32 counties in Northern California, working to calmly talk to people in despair and save lives. Masu.
Suicide is an epidemic in America. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the latest statistics in November 2023, showing that the suicide rate is the highest in 80 years. The CDC reports that in 2022, the most recent year available, 49,449 people died by suicide. More than half of those deaths involved guns. In stark contrast, according to FBI statistics, the number of murders in 2022 was 21,156 (the national murder rate was 18,450 in 2023, a drop of nearly 13%). That’s why these hotline calls are so important.
“The standard process is that as soon as we make a call, we do a lethality assessment. We need to know how imminent the risk is. We do that using a comprehensive assessment tool,” says Dr. Jonathan Porteus, CEO of WellSpace Health. “If someone is in immediate danger (perhaps more than 3 to 5 percent), we immediately send them a welfare check.”
Many factors come into play when a person considers whether or not to end their life, but statistics show that suicide rates have increased sharply since the pandemic forced lockdowns in the country. I am. In 2023, 192 people lost their lives in Sacramento County. According to the Sacramento County Health Department, there were 89 homicides that year.
WellSpace Health has operated a suicide prevention hotline for 70 years. Started in 1953, the hotline expanded to include mental health crises in July 2022 with the introduction of a new national crisis hotline number, 988. The center is staffed by 66 people and is available 24 hours a day for calls, texts and chats, called crisis sessions. In December 2023, WellSpace conducted 10,460 crisis sessions (7,647 calls and 2,813 text or chat sessions). Spokesman Ben Abey said this equates to an average of 337 crisis response sessions per day.
“We’re currently working on suicide prevention as well as suicide and mental health crises, and it’s a great honor to be able to do this,” Porteus says. “Basically, because for as long as I’ve been a psychologist, and for many years before that, I’ve had this dream of drawing the line for a mental health crisis, and no one could figure it out. . And here, the national lifeline for suicide prevention was working very well. It was like people got together and formed a band across the country. It became a national lifeline. ”
In addition to our structured way of assessing patients, WellSpace also has other innovative approaches to prevention. First, provide resources to callers during the call. Second, if a person is hospitalized for a suicide attempt, he will receive a call from WellSpace every day for 30 days. Third, if one of her 140,000 patients at the medical facility said she was suicidal, that patient would also be subject to a 30-day telephone consultation. .
The federal government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration asked Columbia University to study WellSpace’s follow-up program and found it to be effective. Porteus said it is now being used as a model for other hotlines across the country.
“We’re building the ability for them to be able to support themselves, but in many cases we’re building the ability for someone to call us back and feel like they can rely on us. “There was less stress when the crisis was still starting than when it was in full swing. It was very effective,” says Porteus.
The call center also accepts third-party calls from friends and relatives who are concerned that their loved one is considering self-harm or suicide. The worker then calls the person in need without disclosing who is calling.
Sacramento writer Michael Coleman recently lost his best friend to suicide while on vacation. He was so shocked that he wrote about it on Sac Cultural Hub, hoping to share it with others. Not everyone who is considering suicide will have the symptoms. Many families are unaware that their loved one is suffering and are upset when it happens.
“I was really trying to reach out to people who might be having some level of suicidal ideation, and give them the full picture of what it was like to break up with them, and it was really shocking. ,” Coleman told Comstock.
The majority of suicides are white men over the age of 45 (men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women). It’s depressing to know that the CDC begins tracking suicides as young as 10 years old. Josh and Michelle Anderson founded His JJ’s His Hello Foundation in Elk Grove after their 12-year-old son, Joshua “JJ” Anderson, took his own life. They currently speak to middle and high school students in the metropolitan area and also run a support group for families and friends who have lost someone to suicide.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 10 to 24. On the same day in 2020, two students lost their lives at Natomas. Laura Kester, an adolescent medicine physician at the University of California, Davis Health, said the challenges that children and teens typically face have been amplified by isolation and distancing during the pandemic. (Suicide rates among youth and teens have skyrocketed during the pandemic, but the most recent statistics from the CDC show a decline of 18% for youth ages 10 to 14 and 9% for youth ages 15 to 24.) Josh Anderson He says the recent attention to mental health is helping.
“Teens tell us they have a hard time accepting that it’s still OK that their peers aren’t OK yet,” says Anderson. “For this reason, I think all schools need to focus on in-school youth mental health clubs so that more students feel comfortable talking to each other about how they are feeling.”
According to the Sacramento County Health Department, risk factors include past suicide attempts, a history of depression or mental illness, alcohol or drug abuse, physical illness, and feelings of isolation.
“We do a lethality assessment, and then we keep the person on the phone. We resolve about 95 percent of our emergency calls through our hotline,” Porteus said. WellSpace also boasts a fast response rate, with 90% of the time he answers calls within 2 minutes.
WellSpace is currently building new centers and working to reach more people in rural areas. They have the sheriff’s department track calls when someone is discouraged about getting a welfare check. Porteus also hopes to offer video calling and virtual meeting rooms.
“There are a lot of people who call and they’re in a cabin under heavy snow and they can’t go anywhere and they’re suicidal. And how do you support them?” Porteus says.
His dream is to gather enough volunteers to call depressed people for hours on end if needed.
“It’s a great resource for suicide prevention and mental health crises, but I’ve always felt that people could do better with more,” he says.
If you or someone you know is in need of mental health resources and support, call, text or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline 24/7 by visiting 988lifeline.org Access our free and confidential services at.
Judy Farrar is an editor at Comstock magazine and has previously written about suicide prevention. She later learned that two of her neighbors lost their lives and one of her grandmothers committed suicide during the Great Depression.
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