Suicide Risk Factors and Signs

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At one time, the prevailing opinion among many mental health professionals was that suicide hotlines wouldn’t be effective. “Several issues arise when using the telephone as the primary venue for assessing a patient’s psychological functioning,” claimed four clinicians writing jointly in the journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. “Assessing and diagnosing patients without seeing them in person deprives the clinician of important clinical information such as body language, eye contact, appearance, posture, and grooming. In addition, it is difficult to manage a crisis when large distances separate clinician and caller … Most importantly, it is difficult to develop a therapeutic relationship during a one-time telephone conversation.”[1]

That didn’t stop a small group of people from starting a suicide hotline in Los Angeles in 1962, or a onetime priest and longtime San Francisco radio correspondent for the BBC from starting a suicide hotline in San Francisco the same year. The Los Angeles hotline was launched, in part, because of all the attention around........

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