As contacts to the new 988 hotline number have risen, so have call tracing and police interventions, and 81,000 Americans in the past ten months have been subjected to coercive pressure or covert call tracing followed by unrequested visits from police and ambulance and psychiatric detentions. Read the story at Mad in America.
Many callers who call 988 or other mental health help hotlines believe they're anonymous, but get subjected to call traces, unwanted interventions, and police coming to forcibly take them to psychiatric hospitals. The numbers are much higher than is ordinarily publicly admitted by the managers of 988 and the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
As uses of psychiatric force expand, can social media be better used to focus critical attention? The most reliable data available suggests that millions of Americans from many walks of life have been subjected to psychiatric detentions and treatment against their will, and millions more have experienced unwanted psychiatric coercion under threat of commitment.
In November, Jesse Mangan interviewed me for his podcast Committable. We discussed my research into the new 988 mental health hotline in the US and its practices of getting calls traced and callers forcibly hospitalized. A 988 number is now also scheduled to come to Canada. Click here to check out the episode.
Keris Myrick, Shelby Rowe and others warned of harms caused by crisis lines that covertly trace calls, but it may not be enough to turn the tide. It actually wasn’t hyperbole when John Draper, the director of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline/988 expansion initiative, said that America is “on the precipice of launching the largest
