By james art BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – The 988 Suicide and Crisis Helpline has reached over 1,500 people in Baton Rouge since the start of 2024. And after a push to promote the helpline in East Baton Rouge Parish, 988 is becoming much more attention, particularly in EBR. That’s according to Sherard Crespo, vice president of external affairs for VIA LINK, the nonprofit that answers 988 calls for southern parishes.
“We don’t have an agenda, we don’t have scripts, we don’t even have a time limit, we’re only there for what the caller needs,” says Crespo.
Their team consists of about 40 specialists who are trained to answer calls. Crespo answered the calls herself and says they went through over 200 hours of training. Although it’s a national organization, Crespo says the best part is that the people who pick up the phone when someone calls 988 are located in Louisiana.
“We have a really high response rate in the state and a really low hold time, which is amazing — because you really want to talk to local people, we have the lingo, you know you’re going to get some while you’re talking and things like that — and we know what happens,” says Crespo.
Crespo says they often see an increase in calls this time of year. That’s because seasonal affective disorder begins to affect many people in late October, and because the holidays can be a major stressor for many families.
“Even just things like – ‘I’m trying to provide for my family during the holidays, we want to be able to have enough gifts, we want to be able to have food,’ we try to conserve our resources for things like toy drives and things like that, so we can provide them to callers,” says Crespo.
The 988 call center professionals are there even if you just need to relax, but Crespo says they’re also equipped with all the resources you might need. All information you share with them is completely confidential unless you or someone else is at risk of immediate harm or violence.
You can also take a look at the 988 dashboard, which shows aggregated data extracted from each call. You can see a breakdown of where calls are coming from, for what reasons, when and demographics. No one who calls 988 is required to share any personally identifiable information.
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