Choosing Life or Death
An Open Door Someone’s Always There to Talk at the San Francisco Suicide Hotline Eve Meyer
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t is near the end of World War II, and a family approaches the border between France and Spain. Father, mother, young son, and grandmother present their documents to a guard. Because this coastal road is a popular escape route, he scrutinizes the papers closely. He seems to find a problem and asks the family to wait while he discusses it with his superiors. Now the father leads the family down onto the beach. “We will not al- Eve Meyer talking with a suicide hotline volunteer low them to send us back,” he says. They nod. of the attempters are women. One out of “We will hold hands and walk into the sea.” three is under twenty. He takes his wife’s hand, they join hands with Each death from suicide leaves an the grandmother, and they reach out for the average of six survivors—family members son. But the son tries to break from their grasp. and friends whose grief is magnified by guilt “No!” he screams, and he struggles, screaming and confusion. Each attempt also leaves as never before. six survivors. As a result, three-quarters of So intent are they on their efforts to drag this country’s population will encounter the boy into the water that they do not notice the a suicide or an attempt during their lives. guard until he is standing next to them. There Afterward, each person will wonder, “How was a mistake, says the guard. The papers are could I have prevented this?” all in order. They proceed into Spain and take In San Francisco, there are between the last boat to America. One year later, I am 100 and 120 suicides each year, or one born into this family. every three days. This means that once every three and one-half hours, someone Count to thirty-five slowly. Before you makes a suicide attempt right here—in a finish, someone, somewhere in the United city that bears a lethal suicide means at its States, will attempt to commit suicide. very entrance. Every seventeen minutes, someone dies. Suicide is the eighth leading cause of He pushes his chair away from the comdeath in the U.S., and the second leading puter. When he turns, his smile has an edge to cause for college students. it. “Why would I want to talk about it?” he Seventeen thousand Americans are says, very evenly. “It was bad enough to have murdered every year, but thirty-two thou- to live through it when she did it.” sand kill themselves. Three-quarters of them are men. One out of every six is a child Pick up the Phone under twenty years of age. More than half Suicide-prevention crisis lines are now use handguns. listed on page two of the telephone book And for each person who dies, nearly in every major community in the United thirty others make attempts. Three quarters States. They are linked by the national www.sfms.org
number 1 (800) 273-TALK. This is how they got there: It was 1961, and a brash, handsome Englishman had just arrived in San Francisco. His name was Bernard Mayes. He was an Episcopal priest, but he came as an anchorman for the British Broadcasting Corporation on assignment to cover a story about suicide in America. He discovered right away that Americans killed themselves far more frequently than the British. Especially in San Francisco, where the suicide rate was nearly triple the national average. And he discovered another fact he considered shocking. Almost no one would talk to the people who were suicidal. In Great Britain, community crisis lines had become a national tradition. They were operated by a loose federation of volunteers calling themselves “Samaritans,” with offices in virtually every town. Mayes decided to cancel his return ticket and change the situation. He began training some of the people he had met while covering the story. When he had assembled a small cadre of followers, he purchased a red phone.
“Call Bruce” The red telephone was installed in a Tenderloin flophouse. Then the group printed matchbooks reading “Call Bruce.” They blanketed the City’s bars with the matchbooks—and suicide lines became an American tradition. In the first month that the line was open, the group answered nearly thirty calls, an average of one each day. Today,
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