When I was 18 years old and a freshman at Harvard, dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles by myself. I found a job as a bank teller in Beverly Hills making $150 a week and I lived in a “fully furnished” one-room apartment in Hollywood that cost $150 a month. I slept on a sofabed. I was very broke, lonely and bored as I didn’t know anyone in Los Angeles and most kids my age were in college.
When I saw an ad in the Los Angeles Times newspaper for the LA Suicide Prevention Center it caught my attention. They were looking for volunteer Crisis Telephone Counselors. I applied right away but they told me I was too young. I refused to take no for an answer and eventually they let me interview and take all the screening tests. When I was accepted into the training program they told me I was the youngest counselor they ever had. The Suicide Prevention Center of Los Angeles was founded in 1958. It was America’s first and a model for suicide prevention centers across the globe. It helps over 100,000 people a year, saving lives throughout the nation and world. No other center offers such a comprehensive array of crisis services, therapy, support and training to such a large number of people. It also participates in research that’s transforming the field and saving lives.
People who have attempted suicide or lost a loved one to suicide often find comfort and healing in specialized support groups the LASPC center provides in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura Counties. They have special training for first responders, such as law enforcement and FBI agents; medical training for doctors, nurses and other health professionals; clinical training for therapists, social workers, counselors and psychologists; and community trainings for professionals, adults and adolescents.
My job as a Crisis Telephone Counselor was very simple. I worked every Tuesday night from 10:00pm until 4:00am answering the suicide hotline and trying to help people who wanted to kill themselves. The minute we opened a line it would ring right away. Until a counselor was available to take a new call, all the unused lines on the phone bank were put on hold. We usually only had 3-5 counselors working at any one time. Because of the tremendous volume of calls, we felt as crisis telephone counselors, tremendous pressure to assess the caller and their situation quickly. If, the caller was a chronic caller such as someone who had attempted suicide before, was on antipsychotic medication, was already in therapy, or a mental hospital, was bored or depressed, or not really suicidal, or perhaps just wanted to talk, and/or was “beyond help” for whatever reasons, we would politely refer them to another resource and end the call as soon as possible so we could take another call.
If the caller was a crisis caller, and seriously considering suicide for the very first time, this was our reason for being. Once a caller was identified as a crisis caller, we could do anything and everything we could to intervene and save this person from harming themselves. Unfortunately, the ratio of chronic callers to crisis callers was 50 to 1 which was why we always tried to assess the caller as soon as possible. My very first night on the job I took a call from a woman who was drunk and depressed because her husband beat her and a variety of other issues. She called me after swallowing a bottle full of pills. Before she passed out we were able to skip trace her phone number and figure out her address. We immediately sent police and an ambulance to her apartment. I still remember listening on the phone which she dropped when she passed out on her kitchen floor and I could hear the police break open her apartment door and the paramedics rush in to save her life. That was quite a feeling to be part of that intervention. Unfortunately, successful interventions were far and few in between and most of my calls did not end so well.
I remember coming to my shift one night and reading a follow-up report about a caller I had spoken to the previous week. “The caller shot himself in the head immediately after terminating his phone call with Mr. Mullaney.” I almost quit after that experience. But the Suicide Prevention center had a great team of professionals who helped me realize that I was not responsible for that chronic caller’s tragic choice.
By the time chronic callers have reached the point where the only person in the world who can – and wants to – stop them from killing themselves is a crisis telephone counselor they just met on a suicide hotline, it is almost impossible to help them. From 10:00pm to 4:00am every Tuesday night, I spoke with all kinds of people I would probably never meet: prostitutes and pimps, Vietnam vets, drug addicts and alcoholics, sociopaths and psychopaths, (when someone disclosed they were on anti-psychotics you hung up right away!), desperate teenagers upset their parents were getting divorced, desperate housewives whose husbands kept them locked in their bedrooms for years, young boys who were being molested by a relative and even little old ladies who were depressed because their parrot died.
This job really taught me how to listen. Usually, when people are in distress, the pitch of their voices rises. As you talk with them, if you get to the real reason why they want to kill themselves, their voice usually releases and goes back down to its normal pitch. It is a very subtle thing that happens but is very important. That little old lady who wanted to kill herself because her parrot died never dropped her voice. So we kept talking. And talking. And finally got to the real problem which was that her son never came to visit her. The minute we did her voice dropped.
I’ll always be grateful that the LA Suicide Center took a chance on an 18-year-old boy from Boston. I learned a lot.
