By 
Starting Saturday, Americans will be able to call a new three-digit number if they are experiencing a mental-health crisis.
The new 988 hotline, created through the bipartisan National Suicide Hotline Designation Act, will transition what was formerly the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The hotline is for people who are experiencing mental-health issues, including suicidal thoughts, and can be either called or texted.
“988 is more than a number, it is a message: we’re there for you. Through this and other actions, we are treating mental health as a priority and putting crisis care in reach for more Americans,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a press release. “There is still much work to do. But what matters is that we’re launching, 988 will be live. We are looking to every governor and every state in the nation to do their part to make this a long-term success.”
So who is on the other end of the line when a person calls 988?
Through a network of over 200 local, state and national call centers throughout the country, people suffering from a mental-health crisis will be connected to “trained crisis counselors” for the help that’s deemed necessary.
By abbreviating the number, now patterned on the long-standing 911 emergency-services number, it’s hoped that people may be more likely to call in moments of crisis than if they had to look up the 10-digit number that was previously used. The 10-digit hotline will remain available after the 988 hotline launches, but calls to that number will reroute to the 988 call centers.
All telephone service and text providers in the country, as well as U.S. territories American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, are required by the FCC to activate 988 no later than July 16, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services announced.
The 988 phone and text line will operate 24/7.
Some people have criticized previous versions of the U.S.’s suicide-prevention hotlines over their sometimes unacceptably long wait times. The move to this new model aims to remedy that issue by directing people’s calls to local call centers first, and then to national ones if there is a high local volume of calls.
“If the local crisis center is unable to take the call, the caller will be automatically routed to a national backup crisis center,” the 988 information center webpage says.
Six in 10 respondents to a 2019 Universal Health Services
UHS,
+2.77%
poll said either they or someone close to them suffered from mental illness or had suffered from mental illness in the past 12 months.
Suicide in 2020 was the second leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 14 and 25 to 34, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. had one death by suicide every 11 minutes in 2020.
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