Red Crown posted:

I did the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL) for a summer in college. It was a very meaningful, fulfilling, and difficult experience.

The NSPL relies heavily on volunteers already being fundamentally OK people with decent empathy skills. We got about 40 hours of training before going live on the line. It was a crash course in active listening skills, which seem simple, but require discipline. In turn, active listening is an extremely powerful tool. I'd rank this kick-start in active listening as one of the most important skills I use in my life, both personal and professional.

You'll hear some heavy stuff. Most callers are going to dial that number at the lowest point in their lives. If you've got heart enough to be there to begin with, you're going to be moved. Being healthy and stable already is important. That doesn't mean you can't have problems - plenty of the full time workers and volunteers I was with had their own battles with mental illness and even suicidality in their past. But if you're Going Through It Right Now, working a crisis line is probably not going to be good for you.

Some of the hard parts are obvious: you might lose people you just had on the line. I, personally, never had one, but the other person on shift was pretty sure that the caller hung up and completed their suicide attempt. Other hard parts are not obvious: there are a lot of humans out there who have run out of places to turn, and free counseling/crisis lines are the only places that will provide them any social support. Often, these people were profoundly mentally ill. They might be on the line for several hours a day. You can burn out pretty quickly with those folks, but they're in need, too.

I'll tell you though, the wins are big when they come. I had a few callers who went from seriously considering killing themselves to realizing that they both could go on living and wanted to go on living in the space of a few minutes. There's incredible power in the briefest connection you form.