this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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This might sound unsympathetic, but it's easy to put someone else in a situation where they must call the police / ambulance.
It doesn't really matter how close a friend is. If you say you're at risk of harming yourself or others, they don't have a lot of options.
I work for a mental health crisis line. We are taught, with extremity, to always go for least intrusive intervention possible. We will only ever call Emergency Services after a literal check list to ensure it's the last resort possible.
Practically the only times we ever call EMS on someone is if they tell us they are actively dying this very second, due to injury or overdose, etc. Or if they, after all of our attempts to listen, empathize, talk about what's going on, talk about how they're feeling tonight, work on what options there might be, who in their lives might be able to help, listing resources, and attempting to safety plan; if after all that, they say "yeah, I'm gonna kill myself specifically in this fashion and I'm gonna do it right now, and I have the means available to me." Then hang up and don't answer when we call back. Then we call EMS.
It's drilled into us that EMS is expensive for the person, and potentially dangerous because police are often not great at responding to Mental Health emergencies. So always the last last last resort.
That sounds like a good protocol but that was not followed in the incident I was referencing
Yeah, unfortunately not all call centers have the same policies. I can only speak for mine.