July marks the anniversary of a monumental event in suicide prevention history – the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is two years old.
“I was here the day that it launched,” said Amy Castro, a crisis worker at Scioto Pant Valley Mental Health Center’s Martha Cottrill Clinic. “It was a Saturday.”
Castro said that usage of the 988 line was slow at first when it went live in July 2022.
“Our total call volume that month was 89,” she said. “But this May we took 179 calls. That’s a long way from 89.”
The Crisis Center at SPVMHC is one of 19 across the state of Ohio that receives 988 calls. It not only serves the five counties in the catchment area of Paint Valley ADAMH, but also three additional counties to the south.
“The 988 phone crisis and mental health line is important,” said Dr. Barbara Mahaffey, the executive director at SPVMHC. “It enables people from Ross, Pike, Pickaway, Highland, Fayette, Lawrence, Adams, and Scioto counties the ability to call and talk with Crisis Workers 24/7 who offer confidential help and connections to life/assistance resources.”
On average, roughly five Ohioans die by suicide each day, according to the Health Policy Institute of Ohio – a number that has risen by 40 percent since 2007.
Before federal funding allowed the launch of the national 988 line, SPVMHC already operated a crisis line – that remains active. However, Castro said, 988 revolutionized the process.
“It’s allowed us to be fully staffed so we could handle the uptick in calls and be prepared,” she said. “Plus, it is a lot easier to just call 988 than to look up a number for who to call – especially when you’re in crisis mode.”
In May of this year, SPVMHC received 1,741 total calls and 179 of them were to 988.
“It’s consistently 10 percent-ish of all the calls,” Castro said. “It used to be one person on this line almost 24/7 and now we have two people on the (evening) shift.”
It took just two months for 988 calls at SPVMHC to hit triple digits. Since that point in September 2022, 18 of the next 22 months reached that point.
“Our numbers have steadily gone up,” Castro said. “We have probably the same amount of people who express suicidal ideation, but a lot more of people who just want to talk. A lot are just having a really bad day, or they are going through any number of emotional crises.”
While the focus of the 988 service is on suicide prevention, it can be utilized in a variety of ways.
“It’s still a crisis hotline and we want to treat it as such,” Castro said. “But we’ll talk to anybody about pretty much anything if they need us.”
To be a crisis worker, Castro said it requires a mixture of skills.
“You’ve got to be very sensitive and very tough,” she said. “And you have to have them at the same time. There are some hard conversations.”
She said that, many times, a crisis worker does not know what led to a caller dialing 988 and they must be able to step into the situation and try to help.
“You don’t know what happened. You don’t have the whole story. And you have to be OK with that,” Castro said. “And unless they verbally consent to a follow-up call, you don’t know the end to the story. We offer a follow-up call to every caller, but a lot will say no. That’s where you have to be OK with it.”
Over 200 centers across the nation handle 988 calls, with dedicated lines for Veterans, callers who speak Spanish and LGBTQ callers.
These services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across the United States.
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