Lives on the line

Nevada has the fourth-highest suicide rate in the U.S.

By Andrew Kiraly

All they know is she's somewhere between Lancaster, Calif., and Las Vegas, and she wants to kill herself.

From their tiny office on the east side of Las Vegas, Dorothy Bryant and La Rae Gibb are trying to find her. Her husband has called the Suicide Prevention Center hotline from California and told them his wife, despondent over their recent separation, threatened to kill herself--and then took off for Vegas.

Shouldering phones, scribbling notes on legal pads, Bryant and Gibb pore through leads. Over the course of the tense, 1 1/2-hour call, they talk to the cops, the cell phone company and hotel-casinos. From opposite ends of the office, Bryant and Gibb trade information--recent ATM transactions, license plate numbers, hotel registrations--and by the end of a draining day, they've helped find the woman--and very well might have saved her life. They direct the police to an off-Strip hotel-casino, where they take the suicidal woman into custody.

It's late afternoon on Friday at the Suicide Prevention Center of Clark County, on a peak-season day that's anything but typical.

"This is the time of year that people who feel alone feel really alone," says Bryant, whose anxious demeanor gives way to a calming authority whenever the hotline rings. While the truism that the holidays see an increase in suicides has long been debunked, Bryant knows firsthand that expressions of suicidal thoughts increase around the holidays. After all, the time of year for family togetherness is a time of particularly intense loneliness for others. And when a broken soul calls the hotline, "We offer emotional first aid," says Bryant, the center's longtime director. And the Suicide Prevention Center is offering plenty of Band-Aids this season, taking up to 500 calls a month.

"When someone wants to commit suicide, our job is to get them through that peak, just spend some time with them on the phone so they can get some perspective on their problems," says Gibb, who's been volunteering 16 to 20 hours a week for the past decade. "Sometimes, if someone just takes an extra hour to think about things, that can be the difference between life and death."

Thus "emotional first aid" is the perfect phrase: It's no major spiritual surgery the center is offering, but a field dressing to keep callers together until they can seek more substantial help. And whether callers need marriage counseling, drug rehab or therapy, the Suicide Prevention Center has a list of referrals at the ready.

Yet the Suicide Prevention Center is having its own crisis--and the organization that many turn to for help doesn't know where to turn. Indeed, ferociously protective of callers' privacy, Director Dorothy Bryant doesn't hold back when it comes to the troubled future of the Suicide Prevention Center. The 35-year-old nonprofit volunteer organization, which grew out of UNLV's Department of Social Work, is starved for funds. Operating on an annual budget of $25,000 for several years now, the Suicide Prevention Center needs about $10,000.

"We desperately need money," says Bryant. "We're always having to stretch something. We've been getting by on $25,000 a year, but we need a minimum of $30,000 to $50,000 a year to do the things we want to do." That would help cover training materials for the 30 volunteers who take anywhere from 350 to 500 calls a month--such as a TV for trainees to watch instructional tapes--and much-needed office supplies.

Suicide? That's so 'negative'

But this isn't your typical "vital social service needs money" story. The reasons behind the center's impoverishment are intriguing. It explains why its headquarters are in the living room of a converted house off Desert Inn and Sandhill roads. It explains its stone-age computers, its tiny TV and why by the door there is a jumble of file cabinets, blankets and boxes slated to be sold to scrape up some extra money. It explains why the framed poster of Snoopy and Woodstock jumping into a pile of leaves--the slogan "We love the simple things in life!" floating above in Schulzian script--is a fitting commentary on the bare-bones office. Why the framed awards--the Valuable Service Award plaque, the J.C. Penney Golden Rule Award, the Congressional Certificate of Congratulations--seem hollow. It explains why the Suicide Prevention Center has to hold prize drawings to raise money.

It explains why Southern Nevada's only suicide hotline--in a state with one of the highest suicide rates in the United States--is housed in a dismal office afflicted with outdated equipment.

"It's abysmal that the state and county do not fund this," says Paul Brown, Southern Nevada director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada. At its worst, there were episodes when there was no one to take hotline calls, Brown says. "Years ago you could call the hotline and you'd get a recording telling you, 'No one's here, please call Reno.' This state has a history of ignoring this serious and preventable problem. It's another example of misplaced priorities by state and local officials."

According to the Centers for Disease Control's most recent report, in 2002, 423 people in Nevada killed themselves. The state's per-capita suicide rate of 19.52 means Nevada has the fourth-highest suicide rate in the nation, behind Alaska, Montana and Wyoming. Knowing this and then seeing the digs of the Suicide Prevention Center can be a shock.

The irony is shameful; the reasons bizarre. Getting by on a thin gruel of community grants, fundraisers and donations, the center is largely shunned by corporate donors, according to Bryant. Why? It has to do with the public relations value of philanthropy.

"There's a lot of apathy toward the problem of suicide," Bryant explains. "A lot of people will want to donate to children's [charities], to children's hospitals, to Alzheimer's organizations or to groups fighting cancer, and we support every one of those because our people that call need those kinds of help, and we refer to those places. But there are those in the community that feel it isn't good for their business to donate to a negative. Whenever businesses give money, they want it to be something that they can show in their advertising, 'I support this program,' or 'I support that program.' Even though [suicide] touches upon every problem out there, this is not seen as a positive."

UNLV sociology professor Bob Parker, who studies such social problems, is not surprised.

"It's ridiculous. Not only does [donating to the Suicide Prevention Center] not give a company a positive PR bump, it affects them negatively in their eyes," says Parker. "It's as though [supporting a suicide hotline] would cast a pall over a company."

Public relations pros have even urged the Suicide Prevention Center to soften its name. "It's been recently proposed to us by someone in the field of marketing that why don't we change our name?" Bryant says. "[The proposed name] was something that was nonthreatening, something like 'emotional services.' And I don't know that we can do that, because number one, the word suicide gets their attention--they don't like it but it gets their attention--and the ones who need to call can pick that up and know there'll be somebody on the other end who is prepared to talk with them."

While a name change might be more pleasant to the ears of would-be donors, Bryant thinks it would ultimately do a disservice: Is someone in the throes of suicidal depression more likely to call up a suicide hotline or an "emotional services" hotline?

In the meantime, the center has had little luck with professional fundraisers, and volunteers want to be on the front lines, as it were, manning the phones instead of raising money. "Most all our volunteers work, and by the time they do this and their job, we don't have the people to go out and raise money or to get grants," says Gibb. "Most people want to volunteer on the hotline. We can't do everything we need to do."

Someone to talk to

Despite the money woes and the antiquated office equipment, the volunteers, who range in age from 26 to 60, are top-notch, undergoing a 20-hour course and six-month practicum to deal with calls in which lives are literally on the line. Stress? Not an option.

"Most of the calls are not that stressful, because you feel good about what you're doing and because usually at the end of the call you feel like you've helped and most of them have a new idea of what to do," Gibb says, though she admits, "But there are a few that get to you. Especially if you can't see an immediate answer."

"But that doesn't mean that you're so distraught that you have to get off the phone," Bryant says. "It's dealt with, but it means you have a lot of compassion for the individual who's calling, but it doesn't mean you have to leave the room, that you have to go cry."

Indeed, Bryant is a paragon of compassion on the phone, but one thing she's adamant about is keeping the name Suicide Prevention Center.

"Suicide prevention is what we do," she says. "People who are on the brink of it--I don't know that they would call another place. We have had people who have called, and they do have guns right there. They have already taken pills. Some people just want to talk to somebody before they die--they're in the process. But we're here and they know what we do."