Abstract
BackgroundAs the outbreak of COVID-19, traditional face-to-face psychological intervention are difficult to achieve, so hotline becomes available and recommended strategies. The callers’ characteristic could help us to study their experiences of emotional distress, as well as the reasons for calling during the pandemic, which can be used to inform future service design and delivery.MethodsThe information of 1558 callers called our hospital’ s hotline for help from February 3, 2020, to March 16, 2020 were collected in the form of Tick-box and Free text, and the inductive content analysis was undertaken focusing on the reasons for caller engagement.ResultsIt was indicated that more than half of the callers are female (59.7%), mostly between the age of 18–59 (76.5%). The average age was 37.13 ± 13.76 years old. The average duration of a call to the hotline was 10.03 ± 9.84 min. The most frequent description emotional state were anxious (45.1%) and calm (30.3%), with the sub-sequence of scared (18.2%), sad (11.9%), and angry (6.9%). All callers displayed a wide range of reasons for calling, with needing support around their emotion (64.6%), seeking practical help (44.0%), and sleep problems (20.3%) constituting the majority of calls. Among the subthemes, 314 callers thought the epidemic has made them upset, 198 asked questions about the epidemic, and 119 reported their life routines were disrupted. The prevalence of key reasons does not appear to differ over time. Through their feedback, 79.1% agreed that they felt emotionally better after calling, and 95.0% agreed that hotline had helped them.ConclusionsDuring the epidemic, the most concern of the public is still related to epidemics and its adverse effects. Fortunately, the hotline can be an active and effective rescue measure after an emergency happened.
Highlights
As the outbreak of COVID-19, traditional face-to-face psychological intervention are difficult to achieve, so hotline becomes available and recommended strategies
All kinds of information about the epidemic situation from various sources might aggravated the inner fear of the public and harmed their mental health [3]
Public mental health assessment and counseling services are undoubtedly essential in such public health emergencies [4]
Summary
The design of the study Because of the characteristics of the hotline, we could not obtain the objective scores on their emotions assessed by corresponding scales. The data came from the oral description of the callers, so the inductive content analysis was the main method to further analyze their calling reasons. The operator needs to fill out a call intake form to record demographics information and essential descriptive characteristics of the calls. Tick-box data includes gender, caller’s mental state (e.g., anxious, sad, calm), psychiatric history, and risk of harm to themselves and others Those callers at risk would be referred to further video psychological crisis intervention treatment or be proposed to the hospital for treatment. One of the qualitative evaluations, the inductive content analysis, was utilized to identify the main themes across the data set They read the recorded free text of each caller independently and wrote as many headings as necessary to describe all possible reasons. The 4 key overarching themes were abstracted from the 21 subthemes using content-characteristic words
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