In November, Idaho to offer suicide prevention hotline

It’s been six years since Idaho – where the suicide rate ranks among the highest in the nation – has had its own suicide prevention hotline, a free and anonymous source of support for people in crisis.

That will change in November, when organizers say the Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline will open five days a week, with the goal of eventually operating 24 hours 7 days a week. Idaho is now the only state without its own nationally accredited hotline.

 “It gives people someone to call, someone to talk to who understands or doesn’t judge them,” said Catherine Perusse, chairwoman of the North Idaho chapter of the Suicide Prevention Action Network, which announced the planned opening.

Tell an untrained friend or relative you’re considering suicide, Perusse said, and “most people are going to melt down – they’re not going to know what to do.”

The hotline also will refer callers to therapists or clinics in their own communities – a key aspect for a coalition of suicide prevention advocates who’ve been working for years to secure funding and plan the hotline.  

Since 2006, when Idaho’s previous hotline ran out of money, calls from Idaho residents to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have been routed to Portland, where workers tried to refer callers to counselors or clinics in an unfamiliar state. Nearly 4,000 Idaho residents a year call the national hotline.

“It was an impossible task,” said Perusse, a therapist at North Idaho Children’s Mental Health in Sandpoint. “Having our own hotline is a critical thing” for making accurate referrals for care after callers hang up.

Suicide prevention advocates have secured enough funding for two years of operation – about $185,000 the first year and $235,000 the second, said Karen Hoekstra, who’s coordinating the effort through the Mountain States Group, a Boise nonprofit organization that works on health and human services projects.

Advocates will continue to work to secure funding for Year 3 and beyond.

Hotline funding is coming from state money, three United Way chapters and several corporate donors.

John Reusser, a licensed clinical social worker in Boise, will serve as director.

Organizers are working to compile lists of mental health workers trained to help suicidal residents in communities throughout the state. They’re also recruiting volunteers, who will work in Boise.

Idaho’s suicide rate ranked fourth in the nation in 2009, the most recent year the numbers were available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That year, 304 Idaho residents took their lives, according to the CDC.

Among possible reasons for the high rate, Perusse said:

• Idahoans’ relative ease of access to guns, which carry a high mortality rate among suicide attempts compared with poison or pills, for example;

• Seeking help for depression may run counter to Idaho’s culture of “pull yourself up by the bootstraps”;

• A high unemployment rate.

“If you’re unemployed and don’t have medical insurance, you can bet counseling is not high up on your priority list,” Perusse said.

Peter Wollheim, a therapist in Boise who ran the hotline that closed in 2006, is helping to organize the new one. In addition to providing accurate referrals for follow-up care, volunteers at a hotline for Idaho residents can be trained on the special needs of religious or ethnic groups living in Idaho, including Mormon and refugee populations.

From callers’ perspective, he added, having a fellow Idaho resident to talk to makes a difference.

“I think people tend to trust people from their own region, rather than someone from Portland,” Wollheim said.