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For the first time in almost 30 years, the federal government has allocated money specifically for crisis center services, including badly-needed funding for research and evaluation of crisis hotlines.
On October 1, 2001, a partnership of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) and the Kristin Brooks Hope Center (KBHC), program manager of the National Hopeline Network 1.800.SUICIDE (784-2433), was awarded a three-year grant administered by the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). This SAMHSA grant is called the HELP — Hotline Evaluation and Linkage Project.
HELP is intended to improve the quality and accessibility of suicide prevention services and to evaluate those services. SAMHSA has allocated $9 million to the project, including $7.69 million to AAS and KBHC to expand and enhance crisis center services, and $1.31 million for evaluation and research to a collaboration between researchers from Rutgers and Columbia Universities. By the close of the grant cycle in 2004, 200 or more crisis centers are to be newly AAS-certified and added to KBHC’s National Hopeline Network. Much-needed formal analysis of hotline services will take place and be published as part of the grant’s requirements.
This is the first federal funding for suicide prevention given since former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. David Satcher released
the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention: Goals and Objectives for
Action. Satcher retired as Surgeon General in February 2002.
Surgeon General David Satcher laid out a blueprint and then a comprehensive National Strategy for preventing suicide in our country. Prominent in that Strategy were objectives to promote effective practices and to increase access to mental health services. SAMHAS’s grant to AAS and KBHC is a significant step toward accomplishing these objectives. In addition, this grant fosters that very kind of partnership and collaboration inherent in and underlying the National Stategy’s call for coordination between the public and private sectors to accomplish change.
S.AMDT3680 to H.R. 4577, 106th U.S. Congress
"Provided further, That within the amounts provided herein $3,000,000
shall be available for the Center for Mental Health Services to support through grants a certification program to improve and evaluate the effectiveness and responsiveness of suicide hotlines and crisis centers in the United States and to help support and evaluate." a national hotline and crisis center network.
KBHC is immensely grateful to Senators Kennedy, Reid, and the late Senator
Wellstone for their support.
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