Passports The Wait

Myrna Pride talks about her marriage to VA Senator Joe Morrissey

For The Washington Post

The Washington Post

Sex Abuse Schools Vetting

black friday shopping

staff

handout

The heart dug by a pistol

Contributor

stock

VCDL Lobby Day for gun owners

DRage Queen Story Time at the Kensington library.

for The Washington Post

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy(R-CA) and other House GOP Members hold a press event to highlight the introduction of the "Parents Bill of Rights”, at the U.S. Capitol on March 01 in Washington, DC.

Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Nationals-White Sox rained out; Josiah Gray edges closer to return

Senator will block RFK site bill unless team honors family of logo creator

Victor Robles has been driving everyone crazy for years. Enough is enough.    

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Social Security has to be fixed. But you still need your own savings.

Miss Manners: My relative’s memoir was poorly written and boring

Ask Amy: What if the mysterious mourner at my dad’s memorial is my brother? 

Carolyn Hax: Is it ‘charming’ to stage a surprise wedding at a family reunion?

Biodegradable fabric might be the next best thing in clothing

Are home prices still rising? See how prices have changed in your area.

Gold bars and cash: Sen. Menendez corruption trial begins

Trump is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of being a cad

Election 2024 latest news: Primary elections today in Maryland, Nebraska, West Virginia

Biden once nearly died of an aneurysm. Risky surgery changed his life.

Haiti’s plight is a case study in the ‘responsibility to protect’

No, Apple, people do not want tech to crush everything in its path 

The urgent air defense lessons of April 16 

OpenAI wants users to act natural around ChatGPT

These four searches show how Google is changing

Why Jack Dorsey gave up on Bluesky

Tired of overcrowded national parks? Here’s how to go backcountry camping.

Airlines are trying to stop Biden from enforcing ‘junk fees’ rule

Pete Buttigieg’s view from the middle seat

Manhunt on for convict freed in deadly attack on prison convoy in France

U.S. threats led to rupture of vital military ties, Nigerien leader says

14 dead after massive billboard in Mumbai collapses on gas station

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

I used to dismiss my mom’s advice. Then I found a note she wrote before she died.  

Election 2024 latest news: Primary elections being held in Maryland, Nebraska

Angela Alsobrooks and David Trone are Democratic primary candidates for the US Senate seat in Maryland

Katherine Frey

“Every call, every chat is different,” said Lalita, 33.

“Someone might be calling with a loaded gun right next to them, or they’re holding it,” Lalita said. “Or someone is going through a breakup and needs to talk.”

Lalita is one of the voices of<a href="https://988lifeline.org/current-events/the-lifeline-and-988/" target=_blank> 988</a>, the nation’s new suicide hotline that turns one year old this Sunday. She might field 10 calls in a shift, talking people into walking away from the gun, giving them an address to a shelter with open beds that night. (The Washington Post is withholding counselors’ last names in the interest of safety and in accordance with hotline policy.)

But what’s happening more often involves no voice at all. She’s texting with emoji and the abbreviations of teen speak to a sophomore who wants to die, or a young man who can’t make himself say the words “I need help.”

They’re like the emergency room doctors of an urgent care of the mind, and they’ve had more than 4 million conversations in the past year.

“We’ve been responding for a number of years, but with the 988 launch the volume and reach has grown significantly,” said Ariel Gordon, hotline director at EveryMind in Rockville, Md., one of nine local 988 crisis helpline call centers partnered with the national system. Most calls will go to a local provider, some — when necessary — will go to others across the nation who are ready to take calls. “One of the things that became much more prominent is chat and text, especially at the national level.”

Before the rollout of 988, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline was 1-800-273-8255.

It was largely ignored by the teens whose suicide rates began a steep climb in <a href="https://www.charliehealth.com/research/the-us-teen-suicide-rate-is-on-the-rise#:~:text=While%20the%20rate%20of%20deaths,onset%20of%20the%20COVID%2D19" target="_blank">2008</a> and nearly doubled by 2018, according<a href="https://www.jscimedcentral.com/jounal-article-info/Annals-of-Pediatrics-and-Child-Health/Continuing-Alarming-Increases-in-Suicide-in-American-youths%3A-Clinical-and-Research-Challenges-11118" target="_blank"> a study </a>in the Annals of Pediatric and Child Health. There was a brief dip for the next two years, then suicides across the nation surged in 2021 — during the pandemic, according to <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7206a4.htm?s_cid=mm7206a4_w#suggestedcitation" target="_blank">numbers</a> from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kids are not okay, and they're asking adults for help

By 2021, nearly a quarter of American high-schoolers said they’d considered suicide, up from 16 percent 10 years ago, according to a<a href="https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/03/03/youth-suicide-risk-increased-over-past-decade" target=_blank> study </a>by Pew Research.

The rapper Logic, who grew up in Maryland, tried to reach kids with a hit 2017 song repeating that hotline number — “1-800-273-8255” — and proved that speaking directly to teens works.

Photo by Kyle Gustafson

Calls to the hotline surged and there was a 5.5 percent drop in suicide rates among 10 to 19-year-olds three times in the two years that the song was popular: right after its release, after Logic sang it at the MTV VMAs in 2017 and again when it was performed a year later at the Grammy Awards, <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj-2021-067726" target=_blank>according to a study</a> by Thomas Niederkrotenthaler, an associate professor and head of the unit Suicide Research &amp; Mental Health Promotion at the Medical University of Vienna.

Teens returned to the call lines again this year, after the simpler, more memorable 988 opened up, accessible through text and chat.

Compare May 2023 to May 2022. Calls increased by 45 percent, chats by 52 percent and — get this — texts increased by 938 percent, <a href="https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/988/performance-metrics" target=_blank>according</a> to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

That may seem weird to old school folks. How can you telegraph empathy, concern and emotion without a voice? How much can a text really help?

Washington Post illustration; iStock

“Quite frankly, this targets a younger population,” said Lalita, the acknowledged master of text counseling among her peers, who understands that texting lends one more layer of anonymity to people reluctant to ask for help. “It is easier for some people to voice what they’re going through in text. There is some type of pressure that people feel relieved of, texting and chatting, rather than saying things out loud, or rather than someone else hearing that.”

When 988 first debuted last summer, a viral post on social media warned people not to call it, that it would summon police to their homes and entrap them in a wicked and dysfunctional health-care system.

Military suicides deserve to be remembered on Memorial Day, too

Brittany, a hotline team supervisor at EveryMind,<b> </b>said they rarely call police, and only if someone is in immediate danger — anonymity is key and the counselors instead try to steer the callers to help.

“We try to drill into the heads of these teens that less than 1 percent of our contacts end with police intervention,” Brittany said. “We do everything we can to not just send police out.”

Whether by text or phone, the crash unit counselors of 988 have one goal as soon as they answer a call — safety.

“We try to collaborate with them to put the means away,” Brittany said. “We ask them to get to another room, put the pills in the drawer.”

And then they start the conversation — millions of times. Calls last between 25 and 45 minutes on average, program <a href="https://www.samhsa.gov/find-help/988/performance-metrics" target=_blank>metrics </a>show.

Tom Brenner

“A lot of what they do is validation and reflection,” Brittany said. “A lot of times, people think those around them are tired of hearing their same stories over and over again. They have us reflect back on what they’re feeling and saying. A lot of it is supportive listening, really empowering and validating what people are feeling.”

People want to be heard. They’re lonely.

For the counselors, it can be a tough job to hear a succession of these sad, wild and desperate calls for help. Often, once the person hangs up, they’ll never know the outcome.

“A lot of times, in talking to people who aren’t involved with this kind of work, they say: ‘That sounds depressing,’” Brittany said. “But we’re saving lives. Even if we have difficult contacts, I feel so much better, to instill hope in people when they’re reaching out with no hope at all. That’s what makes this work so special.”

There’s an email she likes to share with her team.

“The person said: ‘It was my birthday and I was planning to end my life … And now I have a motivator for not ending it,’” she said. “We’ll probably never speak to that person again, but what a nice response.”

<i>If you or someone you know needs help now, call the Suicide &amp; Crisis Lifeline at 988.</i>

University of Southern California

Petula is a columnist for The Post's local team who writes about homeless shelters, gun control, high heels, high school choirs, the politics of parenting, jails, abortion clinics, mayors, modern families, strip clubs and gas prices, among other things. Before coming to The Post, she covered social issues, crime and courts.

Petula Dvorak

Texts, calls and chats to the national 988 helpline are all up

the-washington-post

Covid-19 crisis has led to a big spike in calls to mental health and suicide prevention hotlines

The District

Maryland

Virginia

Crime & Public Safety

Local Education

Obituaries

Transportation

Capital Weather Gang

D.C., Md. & Va.

washpost

Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.

The Washington Post offers breaking local news, weather and traffic information for the DC, Maryland and Virginia metro areas, plus information about school districts, crime, government, religion, the lottery,restaurant reviews and obituaries.