Crisis line strategy of public health for suicide prevention: problems and solutions

Abstract

Background. It has been about 40 years since Russian public healthcare used the telephone crisis line for suicide prevention. The crisis line is a crucial support resource for people in emotional crises and decreases suicidal rates - however, few problems need to be solved to optimize crisis line service. The purpose is to reveal limitations and find possible ways of improvement emergent help for people with suicidal behaviour example, the crisis line of Krasnoyarsk Area Psychoneurologic Dispensary № 1. Material and methods. Crisis line service telephone calls over nine years (2011-2019) were analyzed. Total number of calls, number of calls with emotional crisis and suicidal behaviour, calls structure and their multiplicity. IBM SPSS Statistics, Version 22 was used for statistical analysis of data. Results. Total number of calls over nine years (2011-2019) was 21.496, of the 1.327 calls from the crisis patients (3.8-9.0% of all calls) and 574 calls from the patients with suicide behaviour (1.8-3.6% of all calls). Most calls were regarding psychological problems (36.5%), receive information (27.5%) and calls regarding psychiatric or somatic health (27.5%). Conclusion. Low proportion of crisis and suicidal calls reflects insufficient population coverage with targeted assistance. In order to improve the abilities of the crisis counselling line, we suggest patronage of patients with suicidal attempts after discharge to prevent its recurrence. A risk management strategy using a crisis line will improve the efficacy of suicide prevention measures.