1-800-SUICIDE Targeted for Extinction by Bush Admin

The 1-800-SUICIDE line is in trouble. The government has ceased its funding for this important resource and wants to roll services into one of its agencies.

Despite the fact that almost 2 million callers have reached help and hope over the last 8 years, and a government funded evaluation stating the benefits of 1-800-SUICIDE, the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA), a division of Health & Human Services, has decided to create their own government run system where they would have direct access to confidential data on individuals in crisis.

You might recall SAMHSA came under fire back in February of last year. Agency officials were forced by the Bush admin (after the WH received hopping mad calls from Family Research Council's Tony Perkins) to remove all LGBT references from a federally funded suicide prevention conference in California and to kill gay-positive content from the SAMHSA site. The Bushies also suggested a session on "faith-based" suicide prevention, and threatened the conference's funding. The wingnut admin functionaries backed down after an outcry for sanity from response from mental health professionals. Since the neutered agency is now under the complete control of the administration's fundamentalist Base, an independent resource like 1-800-SUICIDE is ripe for the picking.

Do you want suicide prevention in the hands of the Bush administration? With teenage suicide being the 3rd leading cause of death between 18 to 24 year olds, our government should not be duplicating prevention efforts but helping fund the many local organizations and non-profits with proven track records on prevention. In addition our government should not be in the business having access to this private and sensitive information!

John (AmericaBlog): And why [does Bush want to kill this successful suicide prevention service]? Because he wants to recreate it WITHIN the federal government so they can get the list of names of every American who calls. How's that for creepy? And guess what that will do? It will stop people, especially kids, from calling the suicide prevention line, so many of them will kill themselves.