By: Bella Liu

The United States is creating a new suicide hotline. The new number, 988, is being established to deal with rising mental-health issues, reduce dependency on emergency rooms, and also to reduce reliance on the police. However, funding problems and a lack of staff leave critics doubting whether the new hotline is ready to meet its goals.

Since its launch, many have said that the hotline isn’t doing its job. Many people who called the Lifeline got a busy signal or were put on hold and disconnected before help came. More money was soon provided to the underfunded Lifeline, which helped organizers to hire more staff, enlist more phone banks, and create a Spanish-language network. Although the Lifeline still answered only 42% of its calls and the average wait time was over 15 minutes,

improvement could be seen. Soon the response climbed to 74% and the wait-time average decreased to only 3 minutes. With more funding, the Lifeline wishes to eventually achieve its goal of answering 95% of its calls within 20 seconds. The Lifeline does more than just field calls, texts, and chats; the communication system can also direct health-care professionals to users’ homes in order to provide urgently-needed, in-person medical and mental-health aid.

Since suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the U.S. overall, this hotline is desperately needed. Even though the project has increased in size, funding for the Lifeline may not be continuous. Directors of the mental-health hotline say that new funding has allowed them to fill several essential positions, but long-term funding is not guaranteed, as only four states have approved a phone-bill charge to fund this hotline, while other states use general funds.

Directors say they fear that were funding to decrease, the response rate could also decrease drastically. Therefore, organizers have started a GoFundMe page to support the Lifeline.

While it may take a long time for the Lifeline to achieve its goals, one day the network’s capabilities may expand further than just suicide prevention.