I'm really excited to have to present, the
opportunity to present again here at Psych Cafe. So, just
start off with a little bit about the
suicide prevention helpline, it is a part
of defenders worldwide, which is a global
authority on suicide prevention. So, I'll
be talking a little bit about some data,
about the caller's who are calling into
this helpline, keeping in mind that it is
data from the first two years of
operation. So, it might actually look
different if we looked at the same
things in five years or ten years from now. Talking about gender disparities, it's very
simple, there's not too much going on
that is difficult or complicated.
Basically what it tells us is that,  there
are more males calling than females.
So, for each caller we do a suicidal
risk assessment and they can be either
non suicidal, we actually do and this
is true worldwide, that you actually do get a lot
of callers who are not feeling suicidal
when they call but they just need
someone to talk to or they want more
information on mental health resources and
so forth. And then, you, you might be slight risk,
you might be moderate risk or you may be
acute or actually in a state of
emergency, which means that you've
already started the process of taking your own life.
Although there are more men than women
calling overall, the women who are
calling are actually much higher risk
than the men who are calling. You might
wonder if it says something about the
mental state of males versus females in
general, that's a good question, we
actually don't know. I personally think
that it has to do, about access and
logistics of calling on helpline. So, for
instance it might be that males simply have more access to cell phone or it
might be the sort of social circumstance. 
For example, there may be gender norms
that dictate [ahh], that females should
sort of bear their pain, sort of hold it
within themselves rather than ask for
help. They may be more hesitant to take
the initiative to kind of go ahead and
make a call or it might be because of
awareness and access. A lot of publicity
for these types of services happen
online, a lot of Facebook, a lot of
internet even though those kinds of
services [uhh], those kinds of publicity are low cost, so it's interesting to sort of think
about the reasons that this might be
happening. From our point of view, kind of
working on trying to get the word out
there, we definitely want to think about
how, if we can, make that difference
go away. We don't actually want women
to wait longer to call or not have access,
we want they're access to kind of come to be the
same.
