Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool Peoplehooded Cool Stuff, your weekly reminder that when there's bad things happening, there's people trying to do good things, often succeeding at doing good things.

And really it's the trying that is the succeeding.

That's the subtext of the show.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and every week I talk about cool people, hoohed cool stuff.

It's right there in the title of the show.

And why am I vamping instead of introducing a guest, Well, it's because there's no guest.

It's just me.

I like to do these episodes every now and then.

It gives myself a little bit of a break.

I have to do just as much prep work actually, so it's not really much of a break.

It's just a different way of working.

And I crave variety, so I like working in different ways at different times.

So that's why I like to do episodes without a guest sometimes.

And this week we are going to be talking about suicide hotlines to quote the Mighty Trent Resnor, how are you doing tonight?

Having a good time?

Ready to party, have fun?

Yeah, well that was the last guys.

Wrong fucking band we're here to have a bad time because I don't know.

I mean, it's actually hopefully still going to be fun.

But also I would enjoy going to Trent Resnor tonight in Chanelle's playing a show, so clearly it's not actually a bad time.

Sometimes talking about super serious stuff or dark stuff is what we like to do, and it's important to be upfront right at the top.

This is not an episode about how to help yourself or others deal with suicidal ideation or any of that stuff.

It is the history episode about people who've created structures to help people, and I don't know, I find that stuff fascinating and I wanted to read about it this week.

I'm actually doing all right.

By the way, this is a thing that a lot of my friends struggle with and always have, and so I care about those friends, and I don't know, it was on my mind, so I wanted to read about it this week, And unfortunately it's also on my mind because the political situation is making it harder for hotlines for lifelines, and it's fucked up and we should be you know, a lot of the subtext of a lot of the episodes this year has been like stuff that we take kind of for granted that the government is trying to take away from us now that it's fascist.

So this is kind of another episode in that vein crisis hotlines.

You are going to be shocked, absolutely shocked.

You're not going to be shocked at all to know that crisis hotlines in the United States come out of gay culture.

Like a lot of our stories, this one's arts in San Francisco.

In fact, it starts tied deeply into another one of our recent stories.

A few weeks or months back, What is Time these Days?

I did a series of episodes about the founding of public radio and how it started in the US and the Bay with PACIFICA Radio.

I didn't actually carry that story forward into time into NPR, but we're going to do that a little bit this week because the first suicide hotline was started in the early nineteen sixties by a gay British priest named Bernard Mays, who was also the first chairman of National Public Radio.

He he's such a quintessential cool people who did cool stuff.

I found nothing negative about him in all of the shit that I spent researching him, and to be fair, I didn't read he did write an autobiography later in his life, and I haven't read that.

I've read like people talking about it, and a lot of people talking about his life.

But yeah, I'm not finding the dirt on this guy.

He just actually seems really genuinely cool and interested in a ton of different things in helping people.

Now, of course he did say British.

Bernard Mays was British, but we can't hold that against him.

No one controls how they were born, which in this case was in nineteen twenty nine in the aforementioned country of England.

He went to school at Cambridge studying ancient languages and history, and worked as a high school teacher teaching those same things.

And this also means he was a teen young teen during World War Two, and I haven't read much about that, but that obviously is going to impact your life.

Then, you know, he's working as a high school teacher and he falls in love with this other boy who was like, yeah, but what if you joined the church?

Though, Bernard went and became an Anglican priest.

Bernard moved to the US, and Bernard himself basically says he got seduced into the church, And I think that's really funny because later he's going to do a lot of the work to help the Anglican Church understand LGBT stuff.

He moves to the US in nineteen fifty eight, first to Greenwich Village in Manhattan, and then he gets himself transferred by the church to San Francisco in nineteen sixty.

He has been doing radio stuff as soon as he gets the US, maybe before then.

He's the BBC's West Coast correspondent, and he kept filing story after story of people dying by suicide.

In fact, at the time, it was the suicide capital of the Western world.

The suicide rate there at the time was I think roughly into like thirty out of one hundred thousand people, which is like twice even what higher numbers later are going to be.

There's a place with a lot of risk of suicide, and I think that that has to do a lot with homophobia and things like that.

So he gets there and he has an idea.

It's also possible he went to San Francisco specifically to do this idea.

I've read so many contradictory things because people do a lot of myth making around this man, and he participates in some of the myth making himself.

As far as I can tell either way, he's in San Francisco.

He's like, I want to do something about this.

I want to start to talk to people who are feeling suicidal.

He was like, I should use an alias and start a hotline.

Now, the idea of using hot lines to organize like these days, crisis lines are actually some of the only like hotlines we really have left.

But in other parts of the world and in the recent memory of the past, you would do things like if you wanted to say, for example, like have a radical events calendar, you get an answering machine and you'd put, hey, everyone, this week, these are the events, and you put that on the answering machine and then you publicize the number.

Or you know, there have been all kinds of hot lines throughout time.

There was even while reading about radio in Britain a couple of weeks ago, months ago, something like that there was like a hotline that was a call an anarchist hot line where you had questions about anarchism, you could call this hotline.

And also specifically, queer culture has used hotlines for a very long time because one of the things is that like queerness when it's not accepted is a very isolating experience, and so people have been using whatever technology is available to break that isolation.

And it's just so interesting because you know, those uses tend to predate crisis hotlines, but crisis hotlines are sort of what's left now that there's the Internet and all these other things.

Anyway, he's like, I should use an alias start a hotline.

So we starts shopping around for a room to rent to run the service out of.

And there's a couple stories about how this went down, and both of them are sort of interesting.

One of them, the story that he tells himself, is that landlord after landlord would turn him down when he told them his plans.

But then when he told his plans to one manager at an apartment place, he was like, Hey, I want to start talking to people who are considering suicide.

And the manager said, you mean like this, and he put out his arms and he showed the slash marks on his own wrists, and that manager rented Bernard the room for half price.

Now, the organization that he goes on to start San Francisco Suicide Prevention, they actually tell a different version of the story than he tells his organization tells the story that the first office was in the basement of an apartment building and the manager assumed they were an escort service.

And I've also read that it started in nineteen sixty one, and I've read that it started in nineteen sixty two, which is I think why most articles just say in the early nineteen sixties is they probably ran across the same thing I did.

Either way, he got a room and he needed to advertise.

But do you know who else needs to advertise?

Advertisers?

It's literally their job description.

And you know who needs to sell space to advertisers?

Me, because that's the way that the economics of podcast work, besides setting up like crowdfunding, and I don't want to do that and I'm uncle zoned medium, and so what we do is advertise, except actually you can sign up for Cooler Zone Media and then you don't have to listen to ads.

Instead, you just get to listen to me do long strange ad transitions twice a day a day an episode, here's ads, and we're back.

So our man.

He goes, and he sets up ads on buses that say, thinking of ending it all, call Bruce with a phone number.

He also would go to bars in the Tenderloin, which is at the time it's the nightlife, crime and gay district of the city, and starts passing out match books with the hotline's number on them.

I've also read that he just made flyers.

He goes around and he starts telling people about this, like, Hey, there's this number you can call the number.

He got one caller on the very first night the hotline was open.

He got ten callers in the first week.

These days, operators have a lot of training on what to say and what not to say, about how to listen.

Bernard learned on the job by listening by offering an anonymous person to talk to and look, I hate the British as much as the next white American girl who's pinned most of her personality on being like a third generation Irish diaspora person.

But my god, are British accents easy on the ears When you're down.

There might be nothing nicer than picking up the phone and talking to a nice gay priest with a British accent and a radio announcer's voice.

And so it worked.

I mean, he actually held to the end of his life that he did not.

Because everything was anonymous.

He could not tell you that he saved a single life.

And that is not false humility, but it's humility.

And because he absolutely saved a ton of people's lives.

And I'm sure people told him that he wasn't specifically anti suicide.

He said later, quote, you want to kill yourself, kill yourself.

You have every right to do so.

But not in like a flippant, like ahe go out and do this thing way, but rather like you know, believing in people's agency kind of way.

What he wanted to do and what he did is he wanted to help people who wanted a way forward, a way to escape those thoughts, which is what people who call hotlines are doing.

Right.

And over the first fifty years that that hotline was in place in San Francisco, it's now been sixty years, we're coming on probably sixty five years.

Over the first fifty years that the hot line was in place, the suicide rate in San Francisco dropped to half of what it had been.

And it you know, there's no proof of causality there, right, but there's no reason to doubt that it was a significant part of that.

I suspect that also, like gay liberation movements and acceptance and things like that are a very big part of that as well.

But those are all tied in together.

We all just do the work.

We can't always measure the work we do, and sometimes getting lost and trying to measure the work we do is a distraction.

I think sometimes it's best to just do the work we do.

Bernard stuck around with the hot line for ten years and then he left because founder syndrome is a real thing.

Founders are often bad at continuing projects indefinitely because once they scale up, they demand too much control and authority just instinctually, or as Bernard put it, quote, the people who start things mustn't stay too long because if you do stay too long, you will kill it by your own oppression.

I just really like how blunt that is as someone who sometimes struggles with that.

Shout out to my collective mates, thanks for putting up with me at meetings.

By the time that Bernard left, San Francisco's Suicide Prevention was fielding two hundred calls a day and they had ten people on staff and one hundred volunteers.

San Francisco's Suicide Prevention as a model was spreading across the country.

He also then, like in the late sixties, founded the publicly funded radio station KQED, partly with influence from the BBC.

It was like kind of a like, how do we bring BBC shows to the United States?

The United States radio landscape is entirely not entirely as pacifica, but it is by and large not public radio, is largely commercial radio.

And so they're like, well, how do we do it, And like, oh, why don't we set up a publicly funded radio station, KQED, And soon KQED became the most listened to radio station in the country.

So then they went on to help found the National Public Radio Entre Bernard was part of in nineteen seventy and he was the first chairman of NPR.

And I almost fell down this whole rabbit hole, and I didn't put it in the script, but basically there was this whole thing where it was actually very hard to start NPR because you have all these independent radio stations and they very much like being independent, and so actually trying to say like, no, we're all going to be part of this national thing with this national branding.

There was a lot of pushback and kind of understandably, we're actually, as we're going to as we talk about suicide prevention hotlines, we're going to talk about the complicated nature of creating some of these larger structures without being against it at all.

And I know what you're thinking, this is isn't an ad break.

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking, but Margaret, how this week are you going to tie suicide prevention hotlines into JRR Tolkien.

Well, I'm proud to tell you that Bernard Mays, one of the founders of NPR and the founder of suicide Hotlines, not only adapted Lord of the Rings to radio in nineteen seventy nine for NPR, but he also voiced Gandolf and Tom Bombadil for that production.

So if you want to hear this man, you can go find the nineteen seventy nine production of Lord of the Rings.

He became a college professor in the nineties.

I think he started an LGBT campus group while he was there, and he left the church, the Anglican Church in nineteen ninety two.

I've seen it said that he became an atheist, but I don't know if that's quite right, because he actually became something that I think is more interesting.

He became a soupist.

He became the only super He wrote a book called Escaping God's Closet, The Revelations of a Queer Priest and his Friends.

Quoted by NPR said quote, Bernard revealed why he ultimately renounced the priesthood and religion and described the interdependence, interaction, and endless exchange within the universe as the soup.

For Bernard, the inter relationship of all things necessitated a particular efic that he whimsically dubbed supism.

For Bernard, supism was derived from the belief that love for others, egalitarian government, universal education, and respect for the planet and all that live upon it are critical for the continued health, well being, and survival of the human species.

And I like that.

I think it's called Carsonization or something where like every evolution moves towards crab, if like all plants eventually evolve towards tree like independently, and all of these things evolve towards crab independently.

Right.

You can also see this in the suv world, where you know, all cars are slowly becoming smallish SUVs, which is why I call them crabs, and I'm trying to spread that we should all call the little four door hatchback SUVs crabs.

But I feel like soupism is kind of the crab of cool people who did cool stuff religion.

This sort of like not a denial of divinity, but a sort of pantheism because it maybe I'm just thinking this because it just did the episode on secret societies and Masons and Illuminati and all that stuff, and they basically are teaching pantheism but coming out of a Christian framework, And I feel like seekers religious seekers usually come up with like, oh, everything is divine.

That's the crab of religion.

For good reason.

Anyway, our soupist returned to the rest of the year universe when he died at eighty five years old in twenty fourteen from complications from Parkinson's disease.

When he died, his close friends were with him reading him Shakespeare specifically, he died while they were reading him Sonnet one hundred and sixteen.

And this isn't from a play.

It was a separate poem that Shakespeare wrote, And I'm just going to read it to you because I'm a sucker and I like this guy.

And this is what people were reading him as he returned to the soup.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admit impediments.

Love is not love, which alters when it alteration, finds or bends with the remover to remove.

Oh No, it is an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken.

It is the star to every wandering bark, whose worth so unknown.

Although his height be taken, Love's not time's fool, though wrote lips and cheeks within his bending sickles compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, but bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be air upon me proved, I never write, nor no man ever loved.

Yeah, I just love alters not, you know, but bears out even to the edge of doom, thick and fucking thin.

So it's not surprising at all to me that the first suicide prevention hotline in the US was started by a gay man.

Queers have always been on top of caring for one another because we've always needed mutual aid and solidarity literally in order to survive.

To tie in another recent series of episodes, when we talked about mutual aid in the Animal Kingdom.

We talked about how in the nineteenth century the geologist, biologist and anarchist communist Peter Kropok can prove that cooperation is at least as important of a factor in evolutionist competition, and that specifically, the harsh the environment, the more animals work together to survive that environment.

So yeah, queers invented this shit.

It's also, though not surprising to me, that he was a priest.

Before there was philosophy, there was theology, before there was therapy, there was confession.

The confession booth isn't historically, as far as I understand it, a place for punishment or self flagellation per se, but rather one where you could talk to someone about how you've been feeling and acting and how you wish you were feeling and acting instead.

The confession system is not above critique, but that was and is an important part of its social role.

And I don't know a ton about the Anglican Church to see the aforementioned built my entire identity around opposition to everything English, because why would I bother understanding nuance when I can pick an identity that is vaguely related to me and carry it too far.

I don't know a ton about the Anglicans, but I do know that they do confession as well, and San Francisco's suicide prevention is still around.

By nineteen eighty nine, they started an HIV nightline so that HIV patients who couldn't sleep because the pain had someone to talk to.

And I actually want to focus on this part of it for a second, because the modern landscape of suicide prevention hotlines is fairly professionalized, medicalized, and tied into the emergency response system and therefore police and things like that.

We're going to get a lot into that, I think, especially in part two of this episode, but its roots are just I need to be listened to.

I'm in pain, and I want to talk to someone, ideally someone who can understand, someone who's been in the same situation or a comparable situation, or has been around people in this situation before.

But I just need to talk to someone.

I can't sleep because I'm hurting, because I'm dying.

When I first read about HIV nightline for HIV patients wouldn't sleep because of pain, I was like, that seems related, but not directly related.

But the more I think about it, the more just directly related those two things are I need someone to listen to me.

I feel like I'm dying and I'm in pain.

And here's to everyone whoever staffed that line.

Here's to everyone who's ever staffed any suicide hotline and just been there to listen to people, much like you can listen to dads.

No, I feel terrible.

I don't like that dad transition.

I'm stuck with it.

So are you.

I'm sorry I have failed you, and we're back as far as I can tell.

The San Francisco hotline was the first.

It's usually attributed as the first, but there was one that started roughly around the same time, probably shortly thereafter.

Before the San Francisco Hotline, some psychologists in Los Angeles partnered with the National Institute of Mental Health to start the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center.

And this is a very different background, right.

This is a research and outreach center and it is the first one of its kind in the country.

They also started a hotline in nineteen sixty two.

This hotline, they're much more scientific about the whole thing.

They collect anonymous data about the callers, and that has advantages and disadvantages.

I'm actually not trying to come for that model versus a different model, right, I understand why we use data to try and make decisions as a society.

This led to the American Association of Suicideology in nineteen sixty eight, which researched all this stuff, and they started an a credittion program for crisis centers by nineteen seventy six, which was necessary because the LA and San Francisco programs kind of proved how important they were.

Although actually we'll get into it.

They didn't necessarily, like statistically prove that, but they were ideas that people were into.

There was no evidence against them either.

It's still very hard to measure the success of these sorts of things.

By nineteen seventy one, there's two hundred different centers around the US, but while a lot of them ran hotlines, they tended not to focus on these hotlines at all.

The point of the phone calls were to screen people for in person consultations, because I think they're coming from more of the scientific model, and or they thought that in person consultations were like you know, oh, you have a medical problem, go see the doctor, versus like I just fucking need someone to talk to.

It's such a fascinating dichotomy.

And like all dichotomies, it's false and there's like things to be advantages and disadvantages and oh, I don't want to get as dialectics, but sometimes two things that seem really opposite.

If you take the things that are good about each other and the ways that are in conflict, you can come up with something really beautiful synthesis, as it were for you theory nerds out there.

And then the government, for better or worse, started to get involved in this stuff.

In the nineteen nineties, the Substance Abuse in Mental Health Services Administration SAMSUH SAM SAMPSA.

I'm gonna call it SAMSAI even the it's an h in there.

They started a new center for Mental Health Services and started surveying what the various clinics and crisis centers were up to to try and come up with a plan.

And the federal government starts getting more involved and things get messy.

Don't get me wrong, I think every volunteer and staffer who works these lines is a hero, a bonafide cool person who did cool stuff.

But the more these services started getting tied into governmental framework.

The more they started working with other emergency services, including less savory emergency services aka the police.

If you haven't, you should go back and listen to Robert Evans and prop doing a very long series called Behind the Police.

It's a subsection of Behind the Bastards, and it traces the fact that the United States police come from slave patrols in the US South and then like bad shit and I can't remember exactly the details of it, but like different bad shit in the North, and the police have never gotten better.

They are an instrument of white supremacy.

People have attempted various ways of making them not be that way.

I don't think that they're currently succeeding anyway.

So even when they first started interacting with the state, these emergency services like mental health as emergency service, it's then tied into other emergency services like the cops.

To say nothing about how things have gone this year twenty twenty five with the whole fascism thing, well, actually we're going to say a decent bit about that part.

But later, So in two thousand and one, Congress was like, sure, we'll give some money to a national hotline to stop suicide.

The idea was and is a single number that people can call that will direct them to a more local, specialized organization for help.

This is not a bad idea.

And you know, one of these local organizations is San Francisco's Suicide Prevention.

They've been part of this framework for a long time now.

It took a couple of years, but by two thousand and five, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline opened and it got forty six thousand calls in the first year it was open.

Soon enough, they start doing sub sections for people who are like specifically at risk and or need kind of specific kinds of care and help.

So they partnered with a Department of Veterans Affairs to add a Press one option for veterans specific counseling, and then a Press two option for Spanish language help.

Eventually, like decades later, they're going to add a Press three option for LGBTQ plus specific folks who need help and want to be able to talk to someone who has dealt with a similar situation.

I can't actually tell you about the efficacy of this hotline because suicide rates in the US have been steadily on the rise since the year two thousand, which is the furthest back.

I found data on the CDC website.

There's one exception one year in the past twenty five years where suicide rates fell markedly before returning to normal the next year, and that was the year of Our Lord twenty twenty, which is not what I would have expected.

There have been studies and studies of studies to determine the efficacy of these hotlines.

Literally the study of study I read has studied hundreds of studies, but the data isn't conclusive yet.

It does seem to indicate that they help, especially in the short term and the near long term.

It's not that they don't help long term, it's that it is incredibly hard to effectively study right.

People who call suicide hotlines are more likely than other people to die by suicide, much as the same as if you have I don't know Parkinson's, you're more likely to call a Parkinson's Help hotline than someone who doesn't, And it doesn't mean that the hotline is why you die to Parkinson's anyway.

That study of study does show, however, that counselors who've taken the training course Applied Suicide Intervention Skills train Assist did a better job than counselors who did not.

So there is evidence that some level of formalization has had positive impacts.

I want to be clear about that because I'm kind of coming out strong for the like you just want to talk to a gay Anglican priest a model, but like, well not just that, I'm just using him as an example.

But there's a lot of different ways to try and do this.

But suicide rates were going up throughout the twenty first century and have been, and by twenty eighteen the government was like, all right, we should probably make this a three digit number instead of a ten digit number.

And by twenty twenty two it happened.

Nine eight eight is the national crisis number.

And as soon as it was a number you could actually remember, nine eight eight, call volume went up nationally by forty percent.

And these calls are routed to a national network of more than two hundred crisis centers, many of which started off as independent hotlines.

However, many of them are in life literally the same building as nine to one one operators and are very deeply tied into that system.

And these independent hotlines immediately get access to one point five billion dollars set aside to fund the program.

In the first two years of nine eight eight, it fielded ten million calls and texts and chats.

And yeah, you've still got the Press one option, which saw just for numbers, for the fact that these are useful, these separate ones Press one option and twenty twenty four the Press one option for Veterans Help saw sixty five thousand calls, the Press two option for Spanish saw ten thousand calls, and that the Press three option for LGBTQ plus folks saw thirty seven thousand calls.

But it's tied into that first responder network.

Ostensibly part of nine eight eight's goal and like why it was set up is to move emergency mental health away from the police focused nine to one to one so that fewer cops need to be involved in christ this intervention.

But it's part of the government, so it's not exactly coming out acab.

In exchange for access to federal funding, these local crisis centers have to agree to what you could call non consensual intervention.

So this thing that was supposed to mean the police wouldn't get involved in your crisis gets the police involved, not just ambulances, although even that's contentious and it brands itself that is private and confidential if you call it, but it's not.

It talks to the police.

I'm going to get into alternatives in a little bit, but the trans Lifeline, which is not part of the nine eight eight network, spent years trying to get transparency out of the nine eight eight network about how often the police were called and how often non consensual intervention was done.

Most of the higher up organizations involved in nine eight eight, it's very complicated SAMSA like basically pay is a grant to another organization, and then all of these smaller organizations like take part of it whatever.

Most of the higher up organizations involved in nine eight eight blocked the requests for data from the people studying it at every turn, including people like putting in Freedom of Information Act requests.

Some of the local organizations involved in nine eight eight, like the Trevor Project which supports especially LGBTUTH, were open and forthcoming about their data and as for what they found the trans Lifeline researchers.

I hate breaking this episode here, but this is where I'm gonna break it because it's halfway through my script.

As for what they found and what the trans Lifeline is all about you have to wait until Wednesday unless you can't wait.

I feel this is just not an OK place to break it.

Translfeline does not do non consensual intervention, and their number in the US is eight seven seven five six five eight eight six zero.

In Canada it's eight seven seven three three zero six three sixty six and their hours are every day from one pm to nine pm Eastern.

But again, this is not an episode about how to get help.

This is not an episode about how to help your friends.

This is an episode about some of the cool people who try to help people, whether they do it in the formal structure like nine to eight eight, or whether they do it in a actually still formal structure, just not tied into you know, governmental stuff like the trans Lifeline.

Anyway, I hope you all are doing as well as you can, and I hope y'all are taking care of each other and telling your friends that you love each other and doing all those things because you should.

Because it's better to just be earnest and be about what you're about and care for each other.

Right see in a couple days, Cool People Who Did Cool Stop is a production of Cool Zone Media.

The more podcasts Normal Zone Media.

Visit our website folezonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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