Brief Update on Known Callers

[Frank D’Aulisa]

Dear Volunteers, Helpline Aides, Overnight Counselors, and 988 Counselors,May is Mental Health Awareness Month so it was a natural segway into the topic of known callers at this month’s Community Meetings. Counselors and administrative staff acknowledged that there has been a major increase in known callers. An open discussion followed about how counselors feel about this. It seems like most counselors agree that if we give known callers a little time, support and validation, most of them will appreciate it and be respectful of our time. There are a lot of challenges in the world now and some people are not able or willing to get help and/or not getting what they need from the Mental Health system.

We will continue these discussions and and possibly look at the work we do more as providing supportive counseling along with crisis intervention rather than strictly “short-term crisis intervention counseling.” We are working on changing most of the known caller guidelines to say that we can speak to them for 10 – 15 minutes as opposed to 5 – 10 minutes. Our hope is that this will alleviate the pressure some counselors feel in ID’ing known callers quickly and rushing them off the phone. 10 – 15 minutes is a decent amount of time to let a caller feel heard and supported and hopefully, most known callers will appreciate the time we give them rather than feeling that we’ve cut them off. This is a work in progress so, until all profiles are updated, you can assume it’s ok to speak to a known caller for 10 – 15 minutes unless it is one of the abusive known callers whose profile says to hang up immediately. There may also be slightly different guidelines depending on which hotline the call came in on. We appreciate your input and instincts and encourage you to trust your judgement based on each situation. If you have additional thoughts about this, please reach out to Christine or Frank to discuss.

We are also in the process of adding some known callers as contacts in Five9 so that their name will pop up, making it easier than ever to ID them. We are starting with the more frequent, abusive, or harder-to-ID known callers. Not all of them will have their name pop up in the system, so there will still be some that you’ll have to ID on your own. Please also keep in mind that phone numbers are not always consistent or accurate enough to ID known callers, which further prohibits us from relying on the phone system as a means to ID them.

Lastly, because the name in a known caller profile may change as they give us new names, locations, or talk about new issues, there is a chance that what shows up in Five9 could differ from their current profile. If you are unable to find them using the exact name that comes up in Five9, try searching with individual names or details to pinpoint them. If you can’t ID them as a known caller but feel like they might be, you can just give them about 10-15 minutes and redirect them to long-term resources.

 

-Frank

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