Suicide Hotline Stories

My stint at the Suicide Hotline taught me a lot about how similar humans really are.

I worked from 9PM to 5AM, it was exhausting, it was hard, but it was worth it. The anonymous aspect of this form of counseling really allowed clients to open up in a way they had never done before. I was made privy to their deepest of fears, their lowest of lows. I was just a voice at the other end of the line, but it’s this voice that helped clients return from the darkness that they had found themselves in.

Clients presented with a wide variety of symptoms: suicidal ideation, self-harm, depression, anxiety, grief, etc… However, at the core of every client was a longing for connection and love.

I used to average ~45 minutes on the most imminent calls – the calls where clients wanted to end their lives in the next minute and wanted to see if someone could talk them out of it. Talking people out of not ingesting a bottle of pills, or not jumping off a ledge, was distressing and called for my full attention.

When I began to shift my perspective from “sh*t, this person is about to end their life” to “how beautiful, this person is holding on to a sliver of hope that someone here can talk them out of ending their life… there’s clearly a part of them that wants to be alive”, I brought my calls down to ~15minutes.

My explanation for this is that I shifted my perspective from seeing them in their darkness, to seeing them in their light. The minute that I held them in this light, the darkness began to naturally dissipate. They began to see that they have so much left in their story of life to tell, and that they have the power to change their circumstances if they harness that same internal power that led them to call in the first place.

The problem with Western-based psychology is that it views clients through the lens of their illness/diagnosis. Through this lens, we run the risk of leaving a client feeling broken and helpless. What if we explored a clients’ strengths and resilience before jumping to any form of diagnosis?

Although my overnight shift at the Suicide Hotline took a toll on my body, I’m grateful for the experience that led me shift my perspective from illness to wellness when working with clients. Reminding my clients that they’re whole, loved and worth of love is a part of my mission on this Earth.