About 50 crisis counselors work in New York Citys 24/7 suicide-prevention center. Calls to the national lifeline increase 15% a year.
(6 of 6)
"We said, 'Tell us your story, and go way back,'" says Rich Lindsey, a technical consultant hired to work on the campaign. "We discovered that if you're going to effectively get to them, you need to go upstream in their life, at a point where things are going wrong but they're not yet thinking about suicide." The state took that information and developed an awareness campaign of local TV ads, billboards and posters featuring an older, rugged man with lonely eyes and phrases like "We feel ya, brother" and "It's tough out here."
The one-county, $50,000 pilot program elicited 10 calls from February to June and has since expanded to two other counties. For those who advocate upstream approaches, the Wyoming experiment may be viewed as a model. But for others, $50,000 on a public-awareness campaign for a handful of calls--and no way to know their effect--may not seem worth it.
LIFENET, 11:25 A.M.
Santiago is logging in her previous caller, the man who had called six times that morning. She says he wasn't actively suicidal, and he told her that talking to the crisis counselors helped him make it through the day. But she thought if he called back a seventh time, she would explore getting him to an emergency room.
"What are the chances he's calling back?" I ask.
"Oh, he's calling back," Santiago says. By the end of the day, Santiago will have answered 20 to 25 calls from any one of the 14 different hotlines.
A suicide-prevention call center may seem like a dreadful place to work, but it's a lot like any other office: idle chatter near the watercooler, lunch breaks with co-workers, cinnamon rolls in the break room. It's just that from this room, it's quite likely lives are being saved every day--even if the counselors will never know for sure.
"When I tell people what I do, they say, 'Oh, Draper, that must be really depressing,'" Draper says. "And I say, Man, I'm in the suicide-prevention business, not the suicide business. What I see every day and what our crisis-center staff hears every day is hope. And they know that they're a part of that."
He says it's important to remember that 1.1 million adults are attempting suicide every year but that 38,000 are actually dying by suicide.
"What that is telling us is that by and large, the overwhelming majority of suicides are being prevented," he says. "And those stories are not being told."