Front Burner - Night shift at the crisis line

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

Suicide prevention lines are dealing with an enormous surge in calls, and crisis centres say COVID-19 is to blame. Crisis Services Canada says that calls between August and October increased 159 per cent compared to last year. That surge is being felt at distress centres across the country, including at the Crisis Centre of BC. Front Burner producer Elaine Chau takes us there and talks to two people who are working directly with people in crisis. ----------------------------- Where to get help: Canada Suicide Prevention Service: 1-833-456-4566 (Phone) | 45645 (Text, 4 p.m. to midnight ET only) | crisisservicescanada.ca

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Elaine Chao. I'm one of the producers on FrontBurner. I'm filling in for Jamie today. We've got a special episode for you. It takes you inside the world of crisis line workers in this country. And with the pandemic, the number of people who need their help has skyrocketed. If you're one of those people, you can call the Canadian Suicide Prevention Service at 1-833-456-4566. Here's the show. They'd called in really upset, very high emotions. And they had talked about how they're not feeling safe. They're not feeling

safe within their own home. They're wanting to move, but then there's this financial aspect. But I think the thing that really kind of made me hurt with them was they kind of talked at the beginning on how well they were doing with their mental health, how much work they put in and to see them in such, you know, and hear them in such a low place. It, yeah, it really, it really hurt me to think about. That's Hannah Storrs from Distress Centre, Calgary. She helps people in crisis get the help they need. We definitely have seen an increase in suicide calls, more than we've seen compared to last year. And so while you may be used to kind of getting the odd one here or there, we're seeing it more consistently. And since the pandemic started, calls to the centre have gone way up. Last month, they got 73% more suicide-related calls than they did in the same month last year.

Hannah has also noticed that the calls can be more intense. Across the country, people are under more financial pressures. A lot of people are now stuck at home, and they don't actually feel safe there. Crisis Services Canada says calls to the suicide prevention hotline between August and October increased 159% compared to last year. Today, we take you to a crisis call centre in Vancouver that's working to meet those needs. This is FrontBurner. So it's a bit after 5 p.m. and I'm waiting to talk to Max Haberstroh.

He just started his shift at the Crisis Center of BC. And I volunteer both in a crisis response role and in a training or what we call monitoring role. And how are you doing tonight, Max? I'm doing well. I'm excited to do this. Tonight, I'm checking in with Max while he's on an actual shift taking calls. Max also works at the CBC, and we actually used to be part of the same newsroom. You really want to come in with a clean attitude because honestly, if you've had a stressful day, it makes it more difficult for you to be empathetic toward the people who are calling. And that's, you know, aside from risk assessment and safety planning, that empathy and connection is the most important thing that we do. So aside from the mechanical pieces, there's definitely like this emotional preparation that's involved as well. As soon as Max gets in, he checks in with a staff member who's in charge of overseeing any high risk calls that come in.

Volunteers are set up with a phone that has about 25 lines. They also use instant messaging to stay in touch with each other while they're on calls. So think of it as pretty much a built-in support network. There's everything that we would need. It's all very close to hand in terms of the things that would help us address a huge variety of callers and help them. Max, I'll let you go and start taking some calls and we'll check in a bit later. All right, that sounds great. And there's always a wide range of calls, from ones about anxiety and loneliness,

to ones that are critical. Max told me about a call like that. Max told me about a call like that. It was somebody on, I believe it was the Burrard Bridge, who was calling from one of those bridge phones, which are there specifically for people contemplating jumping. And they were just in total hysterics. Like they were sobbing through the phone. It was tough for them to form a sentence and at that point um i i was aware that one of our other call takers had spoken to him

earlier in the night and that they had contacted police and really your job at that moment is just to keep them on the phone as long as is humanly possible to give emergency responders as much time to arrive as they can get. And at a certain point, he just stopped responding. And I thought that he had jumped. And it turned out later that the police had made contact with him and that he was all right. But there was a couple minutes there where I thought I had just listened to someone die. And that was definitely one where I needed to check in with myself afterwards. I, you know, the way I'd handle it was I just kind of went, I found a little quiet spot in the center.

I had a, had a cry and then went back to work because that was, I mean, there was still some shift left. So, um, I, I didn't reach out to staff for that. They're always available for that kind of thing. And that for me, that just wasn't what I needed in that moment. Um, but yeah, it's, that's one that I had to check in on with myself for sure. Making sure that people are safe is a really key part of what Max and his colleagues at the center do. And with the pandemic, so many people are feeling unsafe because they may have gotten evicted or they're trapped at home. Research shows that women in Canada have been dealing with more serious and more frequent domestic violence since March.

But helplines don't only deal with high-risk situations. Often it's about listening and trying to understand when someone is struggling in their day-to-day life. Nicole Russo is also checking in with me throughout the night. She's a distress services room support worker. When someone at the crisis line needs to debrief a situation, they talk to Nicole. She got in around the same time as Max and is about an hour into her shift when I first talked to her. So the call that I just had came through and it was from someone that has never called before.

And they were sort of immediately looking for resources for some things that they've been going through recently with their mental health. It was something that they haven't really talked to anybody about thus far aside from one close friend. And they were just really unsure, sort of unsure of what some of their own thinking was meaning, what some of their own behavior was meaning. And it sounded like sort of over the course of this year, they were starting to really feel like they didn't recognize themselves very much anymore. And so they were just hoping to be

proactive and to start being able to figure out what some of that might mean. While we were eventually able to get to that point closer to the end of the call, and I was able to offer a couple of resources that they could start with to reach out to and see what that long-term support might look like. But for a majority of the call, in the middle of it, we were just chatting, talking about how this year has been for them, just kind of how their own mental health has been, how they've seen it change and adapt. Not always a negative, but just so much change. I think that's really something that came through in this call and in so many others.

Lately, Nicole has noticed more first-time callers. The centre, like so many across the country, has seen an uptick during the pandemic. In April, they went from taking around 110 calls a day to often more than 200. And with COVID concerns, it was hard to keep volunteers who are really the backbone of the service. But thanks to additional funding from the province, the center was able to hire 30 crisis service responders to meet this new need. Fast forward to now, in the second wave of the pandemic, and the increase in calls have kept up. This trend isn't just playing out in BC, it's playing out across the country. Provincial governments are recognizing that the pandemic is

having a deep impact on the mental health of so many Canadians. Late last week, Ontario added $147 million to expand services. Nova Scotia is also funding more mental health support. According to a national survey this month from the Canadian Mental Health Association, 40% of Canadians say their mental health has gotten worse since March. One in 10 Canadians have thought about suicide recently, up from 2.5% pre-pandemic. That's a huge increase. Max told me that the pandemic has this indirect, all-encompassing impact on the calls he gets. It's not like people are calling in to bring up COVID out of nowhere,

but it's about how the virus and the public health restrictions that come with it have really made the struggles that they had before much worse. It's more like it's an influencer in bigger situations, like situations that kind of were teetering before. If they're happening in the pandemic, that might be what pushes those situations over the edge. It kind of exacerbates things that were already there. I would say that's the most common way that it makes its way in. It's almost that emotions are really heightened at this time. Yeah, yeah, it ratchets up whatever else seems to be going on. It adds to already volatile situations and pushes them past the breaking point in some cases. It's about 7 p.m. at this point, and Max and I are doing our second check-in of the night? So I took three. I think the most serious

was a woman who called in saying that her father was being just very aggressive emotionally and unfair towards the rest of the family. And it sounds like he had pretty consistently been an emotionally dominating person. The woman that Max was just talking about there, she's working through a lot of strain between different family members. And she's really worried that her father might hurt himself. Calls like that feel really relatable right now when so many families are under stress, whether that's emotional or financial. Nicole says that she's also noticed that a lot of people are just feeling isolated. Maybe COVID has made life a lot more difficult or maybe it's affected your financial security or you're living alone and you're not able to see or talk to anybody without fear of getting sick. And there's just so much need for connection right now.

And I'm seeing that through all of the calls that we're getting. Listening to people in this moment and whether it's dealing with their anxiety or their loneliness? Has it made you reflect differently on the pandemic yourself? I think for me, I definitely do feel that all of us are sort of connected in the fact that we're all affected by COVID in some way, shape or form. And I think what the biggest part of that is and the biggest difficulty in it really is the isolation. Losing that face-to-face interaction and sometimes losing the voice-to-voice interaction if everything's over email, that I think people start to feel a little lost. And it just becomes that much harder to reach out and, and say that you're struggling

or that you're suffering because everybody is. And I think that is one of the big things that I've been noticing and feeling and even in myself as well, the idea that so many of us don't want to burden others with the things that we're going through right now, because we know that they're also going through other things or maybe the same things. And so there can sometimes be a fear of adding to the weight on someone else's shoulders if you bring up yourself or your own struggles. But in my personal experience, whether it's here at the center or just in my regular life, I find that those moments of connection about struggle can be the most profound and you can really find your people.

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I just went through a kind of classic Crisis Center experience, which is, you know, the first half of that call-taking time was, you know, fairly busy. I was doing call after call after call. And in this one, there wasn't, there wasn't a lot happening. Um, and it is often quite streaky like that. Uh, just as you kind of do enough shifts, you kind of see it, see it all in terms of the level of, uh, the level of need from people who are calling. The level of need from people who are calling. It's a bit past 8 o'clock now, and the night is starting to wrap up. On an average shift, Max says he takes about 12 to 15 calls.

He tells me that suicide prevention calls are always prioritized, and if they're not answered at the BC Crisis Centre, they get rerouted to another. Max says that volunteers and staff try to answer as many calls as they can as they're coming in. But sometimes when they're overwhelmed, calls do go to voicemail and they get priority later. There are people who, for whom we're part of their regular mental health routine. There are a lot of people that we talk to every day, sometimes multiple times a day. And of course, we're always looking with them for risk that might not have been there on their prior calls. But knowing which calls require that extra time and that extra safety checking and which calls are less safety focused really helps us kind of move through and help as many people as we possibly can in a shift. And I suppose it makes sense that there

is such a range given the service is very accessible, right? Like there's not a whole lot that's available that's like that. You make a phone call and it's a low barrier is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And for me, it's one of my favorite parts of the service we provide. There are truly no wrong reasons to call. I talk to a lot of people who are getting in touch for the first time and they're like, hey, can I just talk to you? I just had a really rough day. Is that an okay reason for me to call? And the answer is absolutely yes. We're here for everybody. You know, I was saying to Nicole that something that strikes me in talking to you talking to her and your colleagues is that, you know, there is this very measured and analytical approach that you guys take to talking about some very difficult things. And I wonder if there's something in there

about there might be some advice in there and helping people kind of process their own challenges because i seem to hear that from you guys i i think about like what i talked about earlier um when i talked to somebody who you know i i thought for a moment had jumped off a bridge it's whether it's that or any other struggle that comes up as a result of the phone lines. It's like for, for me, it's acceptance.

It's not fighting that feeling. It's not putting yourself in a place where you're saying, I shouldn't be feeling this way, or I need to change the way that I'm feeling actively. Acceptance and acknowledgement works, I think, internally as much as it does when you're talking to other people who are going through struggle. It's like a, it's a delicate balance. Yeah, absolutely. I think, I mean, if you're that, yeah, the idea that you have, that i have to be feeling your feelings in order to support you i think is is a dangerous one uh for somebody in this role i think you i think i can i think

any call taker can can empathize very effectively in a way that is healing for the person on the other side without feeling those things internally. And you're right. It is absolutely a maintenance of that balance where you're close enough to put yourself in that other person's shoes, but not so close that you are feeling those feelings yourself. not so close that you are feeling those feelings yourself. I think what you're seeking is genuine understanding as opposed to genuine experience of their emotions for yourself. This is really rigorous work. Volunteers and staff at the BC Crisis Centre have to go through months of training.

And for many, like Nicole, they've come to this work in part because of their own personal experiences. My own father really suffered with depression and just his own mental health. And when I was 18, he ended up taking his life. He died by suicide. And it was obviously life-changing. And he and I did not have a very, very close relationship before that point. It was off and on, as that can be. And it was still devastating.

It was still something that really opened up a lot of questions for me about his life, about our relationship, about my own mental health, and what was coming for me down the road and what that could look like and if I would ever feel the way he's ever felt. And there was a lot of learning there for me. Nicole doesn't bring that backstory into her work. Responders are discouraged from sharing about their lives because they want to focus on the caller's needs. But the work is always about making a human connection. And there seems to be something unique about doing that on the phone. Here at the center, we talk to people via phone calls through a number of different lines that we answer as well as two types of chat that we also answer online, the regular Crisis Centre chat

and the Youth in BC chat. There is a moment where volunteers need to think about the difference of talking to somebody on the phone versus typing to somebody in a chat box. And truly just the other night, I was here working a DSRS shift and one of our volunteers took a chat that was with a young teenager. And they had chatted with us before, actually previously in the same day. It was the second time they were reaching out over chat and things had gotten worse. Self-harm was involved. Thoughts of suicide were very much involved in the first chat. And by the time we took the second chat, which was only maybe a couple hours later, things had escalated and her risk was much higher.

And one of the things that we can do in that moment, if the person is open to it and comfortable with it, is that we can actually transfer the conversation from the chat medium to the phone medium. And I've seen a number of times over the years how that can be a really pivotal moment in that connection. And that was what happened the other night as well, was the teenager was kind of replying with, yeah, OK, I don't know. And it can be really difficult to support somebody when they just don't have a lot to say. difficult to support somebody when they just don't have a lot to say. And as soon as we were able to connect the volunteer and the chatter on the phone, the conversation just opened up and you're able to hear people's tone of voice. You're able to hear if someone's crying and if they're crying quietly or if they're sobbing. You can tell people's breathing. You can hear what they have going on in the background,

if they have pets, if they're listening to music. And it just, it is so much more personal and intimate in a way to hear somebody's live voice on the other end of the phone. You can really feel them there. That young woman was able to connect with the care she needed that night through the crisis line. And right now, there's a push to make it easier for others across the country to do the same. Around a week ago, MPs unanimously passed a motion that would launch a three-digit national suicide hotline number, 988, to make it simpler for people in crisis to reach out. The CRTC will hold public consultations on that proposal in the new year. If you're listening to this and you're in crisis, there is help for you.

You can call 1-833-456-4566 across the country. And to find resources in your area, you can dial 2-1-1. I'm Elaine Chao. Jamie Poisson will be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner.