The new 988 phone number for the national Suicide Prevention Hotline has been live since July, but it hasn't been heavily promoted, partlt in order to give rural areas and others lacking mental-health resources to prepare for more calls. This summer, it will get a “hard launch,” which means "a bigger advertising push with the weight of the federal government behind it," reports Liz Carey of The Daily Yonder. "And officials said they are working to make sure it will provide added help to rural residents in crisis."

Cheryl Witt, project director for Raising Hope, a Kentucky nonprofit helping farmers with mental health, told Carey that people answering the calls needed training in how to talk to farmers and others in rural communities.

The new number is already generating more calls. In Kentucky, crisis prevention call centers got about 11,500 calls in the first half of 2022, before the July 16 launch of 988. After that, "Calls climbed to about 14,100 for the second half of the year, excluding the last two weeks of December," Carey reports. "The state anticipates that by June 2023 calls to the hotline will quadruple."

Jeff Winton, founder and chairman of Rural Minds, an upstate New York non-profit dedicated to helping rural residents with their mental health issues, told Carey that the new number makes it easier for people in rural communities to get help with an issue that carries stigma. “It’s not seen as an illness. It’s seen as a character flaw. It’s seen as something you should be able to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get over,” Winton said. “Until such time that we get people to consider it an illness, we’re going to be hamstrung and this epidemic is going to continue to grow.”

Read the full article about rural suicide hotline by Al Cross at The Rural Blog.