Abstract
Telephone crisis support is a confidential, accessible, and immediate service that is uniquely set up to reduce male suicide deaths through crisis intervention. However, research focusing on telephone crisis support with suicidal men is currently limited. To highlight the need to address service delivery for men experiencing suicidal crisis, this perspective article identifies key challenges facing current telephone crisis support research and proposes that understanding of the role of telephone crisis helplines in supporting suicidal men may be strengthened by careful examination of the context of telephone crisis support, together with the impact this has on help-provision for male suicidal callers. In particular, the impact of the time- and information-poor context of telephone crisis support on crisis-line staff’s identification of, and response to, male callers with thoughts of suicide is examined. Future directions for research in the provision of telephone crisis support for suicidal men are discussed.
Highlights
International mental-health policy has highlighted the role of telephone crisis support in comprehensive suicide intervention systems as a necessary provider of immediate, anonymous, accessible, and cost-effective crisis intervention [1,2,3,4]
There is little research that has examined telephone crisis workers (TCWs)’ interpretation of, and response to, callers with suicidal presentation while considering the unique timeand information-limited context of telephone crisis support. This suggests that TCWs are reliant upon callers’ verbal statements of suicidal intent and other proximal signs to identify a caller as imminently suicidal
The unique context of telephone crisis support may impact TCWs’ provision of care to suicidal men by introducing potential bias into TCWs’ interpretation of, and response to, caller presentation. The recognition of these unique barriers and facilitators in telephone crisis intervention research may be enhanced through: (i) research investigating the impact of gender on TCWs’ interpretation of, and response to, male callers with suicidal presentation that is designed to address the weaknesses in existing literature, (ii) the translation of these findings into TCW education, (iii) and incorporating these findings into service policy and procedures
Summary
International mental-health policy has highlighted the role of telephone crisis support in comprehensive suicide intervention systems as a necessary provider of immediate, anonymous, accessible, and cost-effective crisis intervention [1,2,3,4]. Future research needs to examine whether TCWs’ compensate for the unique difficulties that are associated with the telephone crisis support context through decision-making shortcuts, such as pattern recognition, and how this impacts TCWs’ interpretation of, and subsequent response to, male callers’ suicidal presentation. By addressing these issues, this research would contribute to training that supports TCWs’ in treating each caller as separate and unique, regardless of similarities with previous callers, or expectations of suicidal presentation between various groups, including males and females, which are established in the research literature and repeated in the mass media
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