Suicide hotline's new number, 988, will soon get big rollout; operators are being trained how to talk with rural callers

By Miryam Leon, Unsplash

The new 988 phone number for the national Suicide Prevention Hotline has been live since July, but it hasn't been heavily promoted, partlt in order to give rural areas and others lacking mental-health resources to prepare for more calls. This summer, it will get a “hard launch,” which means "a bigger advertising push with the weight of the federal government behind it," reports Liz Carey of The Daily Yonder. "And officials said they are working to make sure it will provide added help to rural residents in crisis."

Cheryl Witt, project director for Raising Hope, a Kentucky nonprofit helping farmers with mental health, told Carey that people answering the calls needed training in how to talk to farmers and others in rural communities.

The new number is already generating more calls. In Kentucky, crisis prevention call centers got about 11,500 calls in the first half of 2022, before the July 16 launch of 988. After that, "Calls climbed to about 14,100 for the second half of the year, excluding the last two weeks of December," Carey reports. "The state anticipates that by June 2023 calls to the hotline will quadruple."

Jeff Winton, founder and chairman of Rural Minds, an upstate New York non-profit dedicated to helping rural residents with their mental health issues, told Carey that the new number makes it easier for people in rural communities to get help with an issue that carries stigma. “It’s not seen as an illness. It’s seen as a character flaw. It’s seen as something you should be able to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get over,” Winton said. “Until such time that we get people to consider it an illness, we’re going to be hamstrung and this epidemic is going to continue to grow.”

Winton "has stressed to federal organizers the importance of training call operators on communicating with rural residents," Carey reports. "Winton knows first-hand the importance of the hotline. It could have saved his nephew, he said."

He told Carey, “I think for people that live in rural areas, (the 988 number) is a definite plus because it’s that one person that can listen to you and that can provide you with other resources without having that person end up sitting next to you at church, knowing that you’ve reached out for help.” The operators connect callers with resources in their local area.

"Calls are routed based on the area code of the phone number someone is calling from," Carey explains. "If someone is living in rural Minnesota, but their cellphone number has a South Carolina area code, the 988 call they make using their cell phone would be routed to a call center in South Carolina. It’s not an uncommon occurrence to handle out-of-state calls, Larson said."