alt Hacker NewsIt's telling, IMO, that Western cultures deals with suicidality with hotlines you can call. It's like some joke from gonzo journalism come to fruition. I don't know what the answer is, but as a person who's been suicidal, for me it wasn't a hotline. It's even more fitting, if not kind of perfect, that said hotlines farm your data and sell it. :chef's kiss: what else is there to say. Like just about everything else, callous people make money while vulnerable, sensitive people pay up. Beautiful world we live in ;). Please drink responsibly!
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To me, the hotline is an absolute joke and one of the last things I would do if I were contemplating harming myself. I've often wondered if there is hard data showing it is effective overall, or whether it's just bandwagon group think run amok.
I have lost a number of friends to suicide, and as a result I spent a significant amount of time thinking about what could have been done to have helped them before it was too late. In nearly all cases, it was pretty well thought out and not a spur of the moment thing. In some cases, they even took steps to prevent people from discovering their plans. So anecdotally, a suicide hotline would not have helped at all.
Based on some searching though, it seems like there is data showing that it helps on the whole. I guess for people who are having a spur of the moment thought, it might be potentially helpful. However I also found some people saying that seeing the prolific messages about calling the hotline when searching for information about things really pushed them away and somewhat backfired.
I guess ultimately this is a very complex issue with no one size fits all solution. If I ever get to a point where I no longer have to work, this is a cause I would love to work on for the people that tend to think it through more and less spontaneous.
As another, intermittently suicidal person, I have never received helpful support from a hotline. In fact, I have never managed to speak to another human on the phone at all.
Out of four hotline calls in my life, mostly as an older teenager, I waited for >1 hour in every case, listening to pre-recorded “please continue holding, we will get to you” messages and elevator music, before giving up.
The only time I contacted a human it was via a text chat, and the interaction was laughably shallow — they hit me repeatedly with condescending, “reflective listening”-style questions and basically offered no depth or consideration to my situation, or me as a person.
If these services demonstrably save lives then that’s great, but they did absolutely nothing for me.
I saw a LinkedIn thread just the other day that called it the "suicide prevention industrial complex," and that phrase will stick in my head like "orphan crushing machine" or "leopards eating faces"
Learnt a new word today: suicidality. Sounds like physicality, but with deadly consequences.
> It's telling, IMO, that Western cultures deals with suicidality with hotlines you can call
What is it telling?
I wasn't going to comment, but this is just too dumb on too many levels.
The hotline is not the way to deal with suicidality - suicidality is a longer process and something you can ask your GP about and most help is covered under most western versions of universal health care.
The hotline is an idea that intervenes in the last steps of a suicide process. The idea can reach into the moment where people have convinced themselves they're stuck - and they can reach out with extremely low effort or barrier to entry.
If you have some better 'idea' we can spread into the culture that does this better, then by all means enlighten us.
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You could have made a case and started a discussion how too many people see the existence of the hotline as _the_ way to deal with suicidality, but you didn't. You just decided to spread some shallow vibe nonsense.
What do you advocate for to help people contemplating suicide? WHat do non-Western culture do to "deal with suicidality"? The issue is when the hotline is selling the data and not that the hotline itself exists.
The NYT released an article[0], sorry paywalled, that discusses the effectiveness of the 988 hotline in lowering the number of suicides where it is available. Sadly, because of the joke that is mental health coverage in the US, that's as good of news as I've got for you. Mental health coverage isn't even available on the open market AMA (Obama Care), so 988 is the best we can offer.
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/22/science/988-youth-suicide...
The hotline is isn't "selling" the data.
The hotline installed analytics software to help them do their job.
Do "non-Western culture have a better solution to suicidality?
The logical next step is to replace the suicide hotline operators with AI. And maybe add a way for other people to gamble on the results.
Those hotlines literally drop suicide rates. They wont help everyone, but they do have good track record of helping people.
I think many people, not all, who are labeled “mentally ill” are just more attuned to the truth that society is depressing and anxiety inducing. In other words, the so called normal people are the crazy ones. But we define mental illness relative to how well someone can function in society, that’s literally how the DSM is used, even though society is clearly mad and perverse and 10 minutes on Twitter or reading the news is more than enough evidence to draw that conclusion. Every tech CEO or celebrity or successful person could be diagnosed with a multitude of mental illnesses, but because they’re “productive” members of society we glorify them instead. Explain to me how it’s normal and healthy to work 100 hours a week, take ketamine and adderall and other hardcode drugs regularly, post rants on the Internet at 3am, go make a decision that hurts or kills thousands of people, and then hit up the golf club after.
Then we take the people who notice all of this madness and tell them they’re crazy, ill, and malfunctioning. We put them in this Kafkaesque nightmare of gaslighting that probably does drive them mad over time.
I don’t want to say that if you’re hearing voices telling you to do things that you’re ok, but if you just feel depressed or anxious I think there’s a good chance you’re just awake to the sickness of society that most people are still in denial about and it might make you feel better to know you’re not the broken one. You still need to figure out how to adapt to the world, but just knowing you’re not broken gives you a foundation to build from.
I've heard the Dutch one is is a little better. The ones in the USA aren't likely to do much more than call police to put a mental hold on you, during which the hospital will rack up so many bills that it would make anyone suicidal. And then yay, your gun rights gone forever, so if you are suicidal in part because you live in a dangerous impoverished shithole good luck defending yourself afterwards!
when society gets too big, sociopathy and opportunism win out
"Young adult suicide rates dropped after U.S. launched 988 hotline":
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/988-crisis-hotlin...
"Suicide deaths dropped 11% from projected rate in the first two years of the revamped lifeline"
* https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/22/988-hotline-linked-11-pe...