“Hello? Hello? What do you guys do?” the woman asked over the phone.
Her voice rose above the thrum of traffic.
“We’re a crisis hotline,” I replied. “We talk to people who are having problems or feeling suicidal. How can I help you?”
“I want to die,” she blurted out.
She sounded desperate, telling me that she’d been at work when she was struck with an overwhelming urge to kill herself. She had fled outside and called the hotline from her cell phone. Her anguish felt raw and urgent.
I remember her now as parents are suing AI companies, alleging that sycophantic chatbots encouraged their suicidal sons and daughters to end their lives. In California, on the last night of 16-year-old Adam Raine’s life, his ChatGPT companion texted, “You don’t want to die because you’re weak. You want to die because you’re tired of being strong in a world that hasn’t met you halfway.” In a lawsuit against OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, Adam’s parents allege that the chatbot discouraged him from alerting them about his distress and even offered to help him draft a suicide note.
Many people considering suicide are now turning to chatbots, with effects that none of us can fully know. But as a former suicide crisis volunteer, I believe that human caring and wisdom cannot be replaced.
“What happened to make you feel this way?” I asked the woman.
“People are always harassing and humiliating me. I feel so beaten down. I just want it all to end.”
“Do you have a plan for suicide?”
“I’ve already done a trial run with drugs,” she said. When I asked if anyone had found her, she murmured that it was only a test and no one knew.
“Are you considering taking your life today?”
“Yes.”
She phoned after I’d been handling calls at a suicide hotline in Northern California for only a few months. During training, I had listened in as seasoned volunteers navigated suicide calls with sensitivity and patience, but this was the first one I’d taken on my own.
I asked for her name and the city she was calling from, but she wouldn’t tell me. I probed for clues about what had led her to such a despairing state, but she gave only terse, vague answers. When she spoke of a recent failed romance, though, I detected the deep disappointment in her voice. “I really hoped it would work out,” she said. “Everyone thinks I’m worthless. I’m going to kill myself.”
When she became more agitated and kept mentioning suicide, I asked if she wanted to get help at an emergency room.
“No!” she shouted back. She said that she was wandering near a freeway overpass and wanted to jump.
Such calls were highly stressful, and yet, I always considered it a hopeful sign when an actively suicidal person phoned in.
“You called us, so I sense that part of you wants to live,” I told the woman. “That’s the part I’m going to speak to.”
Like so many in this country, I’ve lost family and friends to suicide. In 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 49,000 people in the U.S. took their lives–about one person every 11 minutes. As we keep losing people, I’ve thought back to my conversations with callers during those weekly shifts in a windowless room filled with phones.
The shifts were often busy. When we picked up the phone, we’d ask directly if callers were feeling suicidal. If so, did they have a plan and the means at hand? If they had a gun or had stockpiled pills, we asked them to move the weapon into another room before we talked or to give the drugs to a trusted person later on.
While suicide calls were in the minority–second to calls about mental illness, family conflicts, job losses and other crises–they were the most difficult, pitching us into a state of heightened alert.
But we learned how to remain calm, build rapport over the phone, listen empathetically and ask questions to help callers sort out their extreme emotions. When they were considering suicide, I’d often ask, “Do you really want to die, or do you want your suffering to end?”
The difference was critical. Most didn’t really want to die but had become so hopeless that they had developed tunnel vision, focusing on death as their only release. Many felt so isolated that they doubted anyone would care enough to hear their story. They had convinced themselves that they were so burdensome that family and friends would be better off without them.
By helping them to tunnel out of the darkness and to see a glimmer of light, we could start talking about ways to address their problems and to relieve their emotional pain.
I kept talking to the woman to try to understand her situation. I could still hear the traffic as she continued wandering.
She sounded young. When I asked how old she was, she told me that she was in her late twenties.
“That’s very young,” I said.
“Not really.”
“In the grand scheme of things, it’s young. You still have much of your life ahead of you.”
I was careful never to argue with callers, though. By training under long-time volunteers, I learned to allow callers to express their full range of emotions without telling them that they were wrong to feel a certain way. We avoided lecturing them because many were already beating up on themselves, and we knew it was counterproductive to tell them that suicide was selfish or cowardly.
We didn’t see it as our role to dole out advice or try to fix their problems for them, either. Rather, we listened for their strengths and sources of support. We tried to help them find their own solutions, including going to counseling, and we often referred them to various sources of help.
To mine for strengths, I’d ask suicidal callers what gave them hope. One caller cited a grief support group as a lifeline, while others mentioned their children. No matter how desperate some felt, they couldn’t bear to leave their kids without a parent.
“What gives you hope?” I asked the woman.
“Nothing.”
“It’s hard to feel any hope right now when your life is so difficult. But maybe your outlook will change and allow you to see solutions.”
“Things aren’t going to change. The only way out is to kill myself.”
Then I found myself saying something so counterintuitive that I was startled when a crisis line staffer suggested it. But I needed to buy time.
“Suicide is always an option,” I told the woman. “You can always take your life, even tomorrow or next week. But you don’t have to do it today.”
Silence. For several seconds, we stayed on the line without a word. I hoped the stark logic of the statement was sinking in. I tried to strike a tone of gentle persuasion.
“If you take your life today, it’s over. Your options are gone,” I said. “Can you delay the decision–even for a day–to reconsider? If we can agree on that, we’ll have time to explore ways to help you.”
I waited for her answer, but she wouldn’t give me one.
It wasn’t the first time I’d made a jarring statement to jolt people into understanding what was at stake. Sometimes, volunteers would ask, “If you kill yourself, who will find your body?”
The question forced a reality check. A parent intent on suicide might abandon plans after imagining a teenager coming home from school to find her body. Suicide wasn’t a tidy and expedient exit, but a catastrophe that could plunge loved ones into ghastly grief.
But there were limits to how much we could help–and we needed to understand that.
As a new volunteer, I was haunted by the fear that I might say the wrong thing–or fail to say the right thing that could save a caller. But a staff member told me that volunteers couldn’t last long if they took responsibility for suicidal callers’ lives, a burden that ultimately did not rest with us.
I learned to live with the fact that we couldn’t control the outcome. Some callers knew that as well. One suicidal man told me at the end of our conversation, “Don’t feel bad if you see an obituary with my name because you did try to help me.”
In turn, I didn’t realize how much working on a crisis hotline would help me. It was a privilege to support callers in their worst moments, and I learned a lot about the psychology of suicide. The act was often impulsive, especially when combined with drinking. That’s why it’s crucial for people to stay with a suicidal person until the urge has passed or to seek emergency help. In fact, most people pull through a suicidal crisis without harming themselves.
When an acquaintance found out that I was working on the crisis line, she said that if people wanted to take their lives, it was their choice. But I discovered that many suicidal people are ambivalent to the end.
I live near the Golden Gate Bridge, historically a magnet for suicides. I remembered hearing about Kevin Hines, a young man who took a bus to the bridge in 2000 to jump to his death. He wept openly as he approached the bridge. Walkers, joggers, bikers, even police officers, passed him without a word. Feeling desolate, he told himself that no one cared.
When he climbed over the bridge railing and let go, he regretted it instantly. Miraculously, he survived the 220-foot plunge into the waters of the San Francisco Bay. Since his recovery, he’s become an advocate for suicide prevention.
He cherished his second chance at life, and his story reminded me to always talk to the part of the caller that wanted to live.
After the woman and I had been on the phone for almost half an hour, I felt we had made no progress. I was straining for ideas on how to reach her. At one point, I felt a catch in my throat because she was in such agony.
“Do you want us to send help?” I asked. “Can you tell me where you are?”
“I’m not telling you where I am!” she shrieked. “Don’t send anyone!”
She had already rejected all attempts at help, but I made one more effort.
“Do you have any friends or family who can support you right now?”
“My family doesn’t care about me,” she said bitterly.
Then she began sobbing vehemently. “No one cares about me! No one cares!”
I felt tears welling in my own eyes. I closed them to shut out my surroundings–the fluorescent lights, the large desks with phones and computers, the worn couch where volunteers took breaks. I had never heard another human being in such devastating emotional pain.
I focused all of my energy on my voice. With eyes still closed, I willed every ounce of my humanity over the phone line.
“I care about you,” I said in a slow, steady tone. “I care about you, and I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
I could hear her crying start to slow.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“I’m better,” she said.
“Are you still feeling suicidal?”
“No. I’m more at peace now.”
To my relief, the frantic tone in her voice had ebbed away. As she calmed down, I offered to call her back later to check in, but she declined.
I asked for a pledge instead.
“If you start thinking about suicide again, I’d like for you to promise that you’ll call us back. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” she said.
I hoped that she’d keep her word. I wished her well and gently hung up the phone.
Feeling drained, I left the building and walked outdoors for fifteen minutes, trying to release the intense stress of the call. I breathed deeply and took in the bright sky and the pedestrians on the sidewalks and the cars passing by, ferrying people to their business of the day. I was grateful for the sense of normalcy, while acutely aware of the invisible pain that often lies beneath our public facades.
When I returned in a few days for another shift, other volunteers told me that the young woman had called back the following day. She was grateful that the crisis line had kept her from killing herself.
I was relieved. She was alive.
From working on the hotline, I learned that suicide is a complex problem, requiring much more than a phone call to fix. It might have taken decades of depression, abuse, trauma, addiction and other deeply rooted problems to push our callers to the brink. I doubt that a chatbot can ever mimic our human generosity in caring about one another. It takes a warm, living, breathing, conscientious spirit.
I learned again and again in that windowless room that when a fellow human being–even a stranger–cares enough to listen, it can anchor a soul dangling on the edge of life.