Becca Nordeen had just left a town hall for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline when she received some shocking news. As the senior vice-president of crisis intervention at the Trevor Project, a non-profit focused on suicide prevention for queer youth, Nordeen’s team had provided counseling to LGBTQ+ individuals through 988, a national suicide and crisis hotline, for nearly three years. But a few minutes after the meeting, Nordeen received an email notifying her that those services would be terminated in a month.
“There’s an emotional hangover of dealing with the grief and the work of shutting down the program,” Nordeen said. “In the days and weeks that have followed, we have looked at, ‘well, there are still young people who need us, and in our remaining service, how can we be there to meet that need?’”
From 988’s inception, trained counselors had answered 1.5m online chats, calls or texts from LGBTQ+ youth in crisis. The Trevor Project was one of several groups contracted by the federal agency the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to field calls from LGBTQ+ people, nearly 10% of the lifeline’s overall contacts. Nordeen’s team had responded to about half of the requests for services from the high-risk population. SAMHSA cited financial constraints as the reason for closing its line geared toward the LGBTQ+ community, though opponents of the closure say that it was politically motivated.
The 988 general hotline still exists and specialized services for veterans remain. But free, 24/7 counseling is no longer available for LGBTQ+ youth through the “press 3” option. According to 2023 survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20% of queer youth attempted suicide between 2022 and 2023. They are more than three times more likely to do so than their cisgender and heterosexual peers.
Since the closure of 988’s LGBTQ+ services on 17 July, Nordeen said that the Trevor Project has been “picking up the pieces”. The closure of the 988 lifeline has also meant that the Trevor Project lost the $25m federal contract that allowed the non-profit to more than double its impact by reaching 270,000 people. More than 200 counselors from the Trevor Project were let go upon the national lifeline’s termination. But through donations from individuals and foundations, the non-profit retained 30 counselors who will join their privately funded 24/7 suicide prevention hotline that started in 1998.
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