 and welcome to another episode of In The Studio. I'm Lynn Weaver. The program is brought to you by Davis Media Access and broadcasts on Davis Community Television. That's Comcast Channel 15 and AT&T U-Verse, Menu 99. We're also online at dctv.davismedia.org as well as on YouTube. Today I have a very crucial topic for our community. We're going to talk about the Yolo County Suicide Prevention and Crisis Services and joining me to discuss this very important topic are Sandra Sint. She is the clinical supervisor at the center and Ting Ting Lee. She is the crisis line program director for the center. Thank you both for coming here and thank you for the marvelous job you do at your center. Now I'm going to ask you a simple question and who are the people you are helping? Well, thank you, Lynn, for having us. And we have a variety of programs. We run 24-hour crisis lines and those include our Suicide Prevention Crisis Lines, our Ask Ting hotline where Yolo County youth can call and talk about any issues they might be having with maybe school or bullying or their families or friends. And we also have a school violence reporting line. And so that is a safe place where people can report if they think maybe something dangerous is going to happen at their school or if a parent maybe has concerns. And we also have our school program, our Choose Life School program where our credentialed teacher goes out to the secondary schools in Yolo County and she presents the Signs of Suicide Program which is essentially trying to teach them that depression is a treatable illness, that suicide is usually kind of a product of untreated depression and I think most importantly, where do you get help if you or someone you know feels this way? Who can you talk to? Who can you turn to? We also have our survivor support group and that's more formally called our friends and families of suicide loss and that's a support group for people who have lost someone to suicide. And I find it really, really helpful for people that haven't really been able to talk about this really complicated loss and they're really complex grieving. And then lastly, we have just started partnering with Yolo Community Care Continuum. They're Safe Harbor House and we do follow up calls to clients that have been discharged to kind of see how they're doing, check in with them and kind of make sure they're still doing well. When you mean they're being discharged, they're being discharged from this particular. From this particular crisis house. Crisis house. Crisis residential program for folks who need the particular support of being in a 24-hour residential program but don't quite need to be in the psychiatric hospital. It's for people who are in crisis. And where is this house located? In Woodland. In Woodland, I see. Now, the first question that comes to mind, you mentioned high school students and young people, is are these suicide prevention programs open to everybody, no matter what the age? Yeah, I think it's important to kind of highlight that our crisis lines are 24 hours a day available. Anybody who calls, we will help them and the calls of course are free of charge. Our suicide survivor support group, that's free of charge as well for people who've lost somebody to suicide. And our classroom program where we go into the junior high and high school programs that's funded partially through some of the school districts and the county as well as grants. And we will display the 24 hours crisis lines towards the end of our interview so that people can actually make a note and call if necessary. And these calls, well, before we get ahead about what type of calls you're getting, let's talk and Sandra or Ting Ting, whoever wants to respond about what is this, with this organization that you are directors of. Can you explain to me what it is? Well, suicide prevention. Is it a non-profit? It's a non-profit organization. Yeah, it's a non-profit. So it doesn't have anything to do per se with the state, right? Right, it's an independent private nonprofit. We do have a variety of county related funding private grants and donations as well. And United Way and those kinds of opportunities. And when was this created, this organization created? Do you remember? Don't have to be very specific. I wasn't there, but it was in 1966. Oh my goodness. Yeah, so we are one of the oldest, right? One of the oldest crisis lines actually in the entire country. Yes, that's very interesting, yes. And about how many people do you have there, staff, directors and others? Roughly, just to give an idea to our viewers of how big you are or how small you are. We have about seven part-time staff, they're all part-time. And then at any given time, we have maybe about 35 to 45 volunteers. Our crisis line is answered solely by volunteers, trained volunteers. I see, and I like the idea of them being trained because you can do more harm than good if you're not trained, yes. So Sandra, tell us about what your role consists of as a clinical supervisor. My role really is to support the crisis line volunteers and doing the good work that they do. So when our volunteers have a call that maybe they wanna just check and see if they offered the right kind of support, if there were any resources that maybe they didn't consider, or sometimes a volunteer might just like to debrief after a particular call. Yes. Our volunteers are trained and expected to really deal with any issue that a caller brings forth. And sometimes people just kinda wanna talk about it afterwards, which we really encourage our volunteers to do so that they're really in a good place to be able to listen and support people. And also learn from experience because I'm sure you're getting all the whole spectrum of callers and calls and the type of problems they have. Isn't that correct? Right. If you imagine what people go through in their lifespan, any of those issues could be presented to any given volunteer on the crisis line. So we emphasize in our training that really the important skill that the volunteers use, regardless of what the issue someone presents is that they're really presenting themselves as an empathic listener, as somebody who can be there and be supportive, helpful, can be aware of the resources if it's a real kind of emergency. Yes, yes, I was going to ask if it's critical. What do you do? How do you refer them or how do you follow up these calls? Perhaps I should ask Tintin about this or both of you, whoever. Like give me an example, a concrete example of a call, a real caller, obviously no names. And then the type of how he or she approached the caller, the line and what do you do about it? Can you do that for us? Yeah, we get a variety of different calls but an example of one where you might want to refer them is we'll get people that call that might be worried about someone in their life. So like a parent worried about their child or somebody, my friend's been posting this thing on Facebook, should I be worried? So a large part of what we do is check in with the person who's calling, see what's going on and then do what's called a lethality assessment through the person. Well, what has that person said and what have they said to you? Where are they? Do they have the means to do something to harm themselves? And then from there, we kind of help them figure out what is the next best step. So is this something where maybe they have to send out help, i.e. maybe call the police or 911 or something or is this something where they can give that person our number or something like that? Or is this something where they need a community resource? Maybe the person needs help finding therapy resources for their friend or something like that. Well, that's very interesting. One thing comes to mind is, do you have a mechanism or a way, perhaps not, but I'm asking to validate these calls that they're not spoofing or frauds or do you have anything like that? Well, really, even if somebody were to call and be sort of spoofing, we're gonna take it seriously. It's not the kind of thing where you want to really think somebody's joking. So on occasion, we've had the teenager call where you can kind of hear the friends in the background laughing. But really, it's a very small number of times that that happens. And for the most part, we're really wanting to communicate to anybody who calls that it's an important topic and we want to know more about what's going on for them. And so the occasional teen call that's not serious, sometimes also it could be a teen who's sort of prank calling because they're thinking maybe they really actually might need to call someday or have thought about calling and it's also a way to kind of test it out and call and see what are they gonna say to me and what will happen if I call. Yes, sort of like a test, as you said. Do you take the name and form number of this person? Should you have to contact him or her in an emergency? Well, I think one thing to think about is that roughly 90% of our calls aren't emergencies. We're really encouraging people to call when you're in a crisis or when you're distressed or when you need somebody to talk to and to really call us if it's an emergency but also call us before it gets to that point. So we'll sort of distinguish between emergency calls where yeah, in an emergency call, we're going to ask a person what's your name, what's your address, what's your phone number because we might need to get help to them which would be 911 kinds of resources. But in general, we also, we advertise that the crisis line is confidential and anonymous. So if we're not concerned about needing to get life and death kind of help out to somebody, we really will ask somebody for their name, mostly so that we can use it in conversation. So then we don't have to say, oh, hey, you, that we could say Lynn, tell me more about what you were saying earlier about such and such. Yes, yes, that makes perfect sense. But stress on the fact this is very confidential and hence people will be more willing to come and I mean and talk to you. Exactly. It's a difficult role to be a volunteer on a suicide prevention. So basically, how long does your training last for these volunteers? Does it depend on the volunteers or what you teach them? Do you teach them case cases or how do you teach? There's a lot of components to the training actually. It comes out to with everything over 40 hours of training. So there's, yeah. So we run usually spring and fall trainings and so they're ones where you come in and then we talk about just the variety of different calls you might get, different situations you might have to respond to and how to respond to them. It's definitely, as you said, it's a lot of pressure, it's definitely, it's not for everybody but our volunteers are great. Yes, and how do you screen your volunteers? Do you have some tests for them or you're just by talking and interviewing them? We're really looking for people who have good interpersonal skills to begin with. Generally somebody who reaches out to suicide prevention wanting to volunteer is probably going to come with those kinds of skills because those are the folks who are interested in doing that kind of work. Yes, and it's not an easy topic. So people really, for the most part, kind of self-select, that people who are not good in delicate situations or in high pressure situations really aren't going to reach out and say, hey, I'm interested in volunteering at suicide prevention. Every once in a while we do talk to people who are interested in volunteering who maybe aren't really in a good place to do it right now. Maybe they lost a family member to suicide recently and that's kind of triggered their desire to help in those kinds of cases. We would really want that person to kind of take care of themselves first. Don't start to volunteer as part of your healing this soon. And we're looking for people who are also going to be able to be on the crisis line for a while because it is the kind of thing where you feel more comfortable over time and we really like volunteers who are going to be able to, of course, they need to commit to the entire training program. And to be able to commit to doing weekly shifts consistently so that they are able to hone their skills. And so that we can make sure that there's somebody there 24-7. That's really important. I was wondering, there's been a lot of talk about former servicemen that's coming from these wars. Do you get calls from them as well? You know, honestly, I don't think we've really gotten a lot of calls from vets because they tend to have, there's veterans hotlines, I think that they call. It's a very, it's somewhat, I think of a tight-knit kind of circle. More specific, yes. And I think a lot of suicide is such a stigmatized issue. And mental health issues in the military, that's also a very stigmatized kind of issue. It's very, yeah. And I think that's part of what leads to a lot of these terrible outcomes that we've seen in the media is that it's really hard if you're in the military to reach out for mental health care without being concerned that you're going to jeopardize your career. So there's a lot of nuances to dealing with veterans. And we certainly would be prepared to talk with a veteran who called because it's really the same issues. They just have a lot of career concerns around their mental health issues. But it's one of those, it's also just kind of one of the unfortunate parts of dealing with a stigmatized issue is that people don't reach out. We're not, we can't call people. And if we, well, if we hear about somebody who's suicidal, actually we do reach out to call them. But if we don't know about somebody, people sitting quietly in their homes depressed and suicidal. Of course. You know, their phone's not going to ring. They need to call us. And that's the hard thing about suicide education. It's really making them do that. And how do you advertise to, what is your outreach? Obviously you have limited budget. So how do you make yourself known to the community? I heard that you have a fundraiser come up in November, isn't that right? We do. We have one on November 30th. It's the Sunday after Thanksgiving. It's from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Davis Odd Fellows Lodge, which is in downtown Davis. But in terms of outreach, we do a variety of presentations to organizations and companies around Yolo County. You know, we have a website, Facebook. And we, you know, we hand out a lot of materials to like local mental health professionals, that kind of thing to kind of put it out there. And, you know, we now have a toll-free number and we actually just joined the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Oh, great. And so, do you come in? And as a matter of fact, I wanted to display these 24-hours crisis lines. And as soon as they display, so basically these are the 24-hours crisis lines. So in Davis is 530-756-5000. And then in Woodland is 536-666-7778. And in West Sacramento is 916-372-6565. And we're going to display them again at the end of the interview. So people will have had time to make a note. So these are 24-hours phone numbers and they're not toll-free, but they're local numbers. Correct? They're local numbers. And when we first set up the crisis lines, that was back in the day where everybody didn't have cell phones and making your phone calls. You know, if you made a toll call, you were paying 10 cents a minute for every phone call. So it tends not to be the barrier that it used to be before. That's right. Very good point. So we've tried to have the reason we have three different lines for the community. It's just so that it has more of a community feel. But also we know that there's other parts of the county that aren't Davis, Woodland or West Sacramento, the more rural areas. And we would encourage those folks to just call whichever number they want to call. Oh, that's very interesting. So you mentioned the veterinary hospital hotline. Do you know of other organizations, I mean other hotlines in this area that, yeah? Yeah, there's centers throughout the state. Yeah, we're one of many kind of crisis lines in the state in terms of local crisis lines. Another organization runs a crisis line for victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. So they do a similar kind of operation. Our line also, as Tingting mentioned, we're going to become part of the national lifeline network. So there's an 800 number that if local individuals call that number, that call will get routed to our center. Oh, that's wonderful. Yes. And by the way, please, I encourage you to go to their website, which is yolocountysuicidepreventionandcrisis.org. I believe I said it all. I think it's suicidepreventionyolocounty.org. So all of them. Suicidepreventionyolocounty.org. Wonderful. What other services do you provide? I mean, this is obviously the most crucial one. But what else do you do? Well, yeah, so the most of our services are really anchoring on the 24-hour crisis line and then doing outreach to really encourage people to use those numbers when they are in crisis. So even so we've got the crisis line and then we have our outreach to schools program and talking about the crisis line and reaching out for help is a really important component of that. And then, of course, the survivor support group, which is held three times a year roughly for a several-week period for individuals who are coming in after having lost someone to suicide and it's a good support. That's very interesting. You alluded to that earlier. In other words, you have a support group for families and friends of victims of suicide. And that certainly must be a most helpful program. I can't imagine how dreadful it must be to lose someone to suicide. So that's a wonderful thing. So what to switch gears? I'd like to know a little more about yourselves now that you've talked about what you do. So who wants to start? Do you want to start, Sandra? Yeah. Well, I'm local to Davis. And I've been with suicide prevention now. I guess I'm going on 25 years with suicide prevention. I started in- My goodness. Yeah. That's a very long time. I started in- You must have been a baby when you joined. I was in college, actually. But yeah, so I started in 1989 as a volunteer. And then I've been employed with the agency for the most part since 1991. So I've got a long history with the organization. And it's always been a part-time job for me. So I've always kind of worked suicide prevention in the evening trainings and those kinds of things. I imagine you have a family. Yes, I do. I live locally. And I have a husband and child. Do you derive a lot of satisfaction from your work? Yeah, you know, when you work in a nonprofit, you get very connected to the issue. And so that's kind of, I think, what's kept me connected for 25 years. And so it's been a part of my son's life since he was born, coming to fundraisers and coming to meetings. And so as a- Oh, wonderful. Oh, wonderful. What about you, Ting Ting? Tell us your story. I'm also a local. I came here in eighth grade to Davis. And I went to Emerson and then Davis High and then UC Davis. And then I started volunteering while I was in college as well in 2006. And I've been with them since we've been really lucky. We have a lot of staff that are long timers. So it's a really good group. And I suppose you also try to maybe recruit in a way from UC Davis for your volunteers. I imagine that you have some. Yeah, the university is a huge resource for volunteers, for us particularly students who are in the psychology majors. They often reach out to us because they're looking for some real life experience that they can do to kind of test out if this is a field they really want to go into. And by the way, how can volunteers reach you? Is there a place on the website where they can sign up? Yeah, there's a place on the website where they can find our contact information. And they can either call for more information or they can email us, both of which are fine. Well, that sounds wonderful. Let's display the crisis lines one more time. And here they are. And again, I'm going to, Davis is 530-756-5000. And Woodland is 530-666-778. 7778, sorry. And West Sacramento is 916-372-6565. Well, our time is up, I'm afraid, but it was wonderful to have you here in the studio. And thank you so much for all the wonderful, important work that you do for our community. We're very grateful to you. And this is it. So. Thank you for having us. Thank you, thank you. And thank you, all of you, for watching. You can watch this, you can stream this episode again by going to dctv.davismedia.org. And also, we're on YouTube, but we also broadcast, of course, and on community television, Comcast Channel 15, and or AT&T, sorry, and AT&T U-Verse, menu 99. So, thank you very much for watching in the studio from all of us here at Davis Media Access. We say goodbye and hope you see you next time. Thank you.