Experts fear a deluge of suicides due to COVID

This story first appeared on ebar.com May 27, 2020:

A San Francisco Suicide Prevention report on the calls it receives shows that between the end of February and the beginning of April — as the novel coronavirus began to spread in the community, workers were laid off en mass, and small businesses shuttered — the number of medium- and high-risk calls increased by 60%.

Meanwhile Van Hedwall, a gay man who serves as SF Suicide Prevention’s director of programs, was hemorrhaging volunteers — the organization did not yet have a way to work from home after the city and surrounding counties issued a shelter-in-place order March 16.

“This is a pretty significant increase,” Hedwall said of the higher risk calls.

“We didn’t have a way for the call center to be remote until mid-April, so we were working in the office that first month of shelter-in-place,” Hedwall said in a phone interview with the Bay Area Reporter May 19. “Because of that our volunteer force of 150 fell off, so we were having to run the center with just staff.”

Volunteer rates have inched back up to about 80 people, Hedwall said, and after one of them connected SF Suicide Prevention with Cisco Systems they were able to start working from home — but that disruption (and the call center’s new ability to screen out prank calls) means that quantitative data on the number of calls per se is not the most accurate indicator of the stresses people are experiencing in the present crisis.

The categories of calls that have increased — those that are medium- and high-risk — require more work on the part of the volunteer counselors than offering encouraging words.

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