Does a TOS on a suicide prevention line feel a bit coercive to anyone else?
No they should be open to litigation, so this social service can be immediately sued for its entire years budget. It’s not coercive its pragmatic.
Is this new? I’m pretty sure responder services (such as 911 operators and suicide hotline operators) have immunity so long as they’re acting in good faith. Also, there used to be good Samaritan laws that allowed independent civilians to offer help, so long as they act in good faith.
Yes, a dead victim’s family might want to try to sue the hotline service, but the entire dialog is recorded and proving bad faith would be difficult to do.
Granted, our courts are corrupt like a Seagate HD, but even a click-wrap ToS won’t affect those judges who have something to prove.
I find it comparable to the old Rodney Dangerfield joke I called suicide prevention and they put me on hold. I’ve actually had that happen, since rushes can overwhelm the operator pool.
Isn’t the operator pool way too small at the moment?
Did you read them? The link explains the terms fairly clearly. It’s not a 50 page Eula from some software company, it’s like half a page and written in plain language
Like it or not mental health services have liability involved. As an ethical service or practitioner it is important to make these liabilities clear to you as part of informed consent to use the service
I do the same thing when people have their first outpatient mental health appointment with me. Explanation that costs incurred may be your responsibility, that while there is confidentiality it has limitations, that the service is voluntary, grievance procedures, expectations for you, etc.
It appears they spell out the same:
Costs: it is a free service but they make it clear they cannot be held responsible if your carrier charges you for text messages. You may also be billed by your carrier if 988 has to call 911 on your behalf. They may submit referrals that result in billing depending on where you live.
Confidentiality: they reserve the right to escalate to emergency services (mobile crisis or 911, depending on area) which requires disclosure of PHI if they determine there is a risk of imminent harm or disclosure of abuse. This is pretty standard and I have the same caveat
They clarify that they are not a substitute for a provider and that they are not responsible for treatment decisions you do or do not take as a result of conversations (eg if they give you a referral to outpatient and you take it and it sucks, they don’t take culpability)
This is necessary because if they do not do this they will be endlessly sued by people and the service will be closed overnight. Remember that even if they win every lawsuit (which they wouldn’t) it still costs money to defend from lawsuits. With this they can basically have frivolous lawsuits easily thrown out (eg someone suing because they are upset about a referral, someone upset because they were suicidal and had the cops called) saving a tremendous amount of resources
Not OP but I’m personally not a fan of bit.ly (a private corpo) for what could’ve easily been a shortened link on their own domain that redirects to the page.
I do agree with you on this, I think bit.ly and link obfuscation is bullshit
In their defense their domain is https://suicidepreventionlifeline.org/ which is a bit much. But registering a second short domain on a weird tld can’t cost all that much per year
I understand why they want to avoid the liability, also are you okay?
I’m more okay than my recent questions have let on. I’ve sometimes been too spicy for my (few) friends, and was looking for the old recovery network (pre-internet) where I might get a support group and a sponsor.
After exhausting a list of contacts in Sacramento (either they cost money I can’t afford, or they require interest in a specific brand of Jesus), I called 988 to see if they had leads. The good news is they have a robust search engine at www.findhelp.org so I have more phone calls to make.
Coincidentally, I was quite spicy at the time, as the mere existence of CECOT hit me hard, let alone that ICE is collecting innocent folks and sending them there. My country is for-realsies doing the concentration camp / gulag thing. It’s difficult since I’ve been screaming like Cassandra about it since 2004, and here we are.
But while I’m not a suicide risk (I have dependents), living in a society that is being burned, and is purging undesirables appears to be a valid concern, and I can’t tell if those around me are confident we’re safe for the foreseeable future or are engaging in hypernormal behavior (🐶☕🔥)
But if the White House instructs ICE to collect and evacuate the crazies and then ICE starts sweeping California, then I’m really not sure there’s a sane response. The other concern is if my benefits discontinue and all the resources are impacted or disabled.
and, I’m trying new meds since my previous regimen isn’t cutting it any longer so I’m playing that roulette game as well.
Thank you for asking.
Are you worried the US GOV will start to extend their program from people without citizenship to other undesirables? I don’t know a lot about what’s going on in the US, so I thought it only affected people without US citizenship (although mostly PoC). Regarding benefits, it seems like that is a program funded by the state itself, so hopefully that doesn’t change.
Currently, the primary targets are said to be undocumented immigrants, but naturalized Americans and legal aliens are getting caught up in the ICE dragnet, and rendered to CECOT. The movement to restrict trans folk access to medication and life activities continues.
This rhymes a lot with the early history of the German Reich. Heydrich and the Chancellery were fully aware of the need for the enemy within rhetoric and the need to capture and contain a growing list of undesirables.
Even though it’s the Tiger Repellant Rock fallacy, when the public sees authorities at work arresting people (and making them disappear into the custody system) it shows the authorities are sincere in their effort to make society safer. The Trump Regime is doing exactly the same thing.
And as the Niemöller poem observes, the list of undesirables continues to grow, including more and more of the marginalize until it starts tapping into the mainstream. Every last one of us who is not a billionaire or a billionaire’s favored sex-puppet is on the list. Some of us are higher on that list than others.
Shortly after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploded in 2004, more news showed that this was the first appearance of a larger CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program. Rumsfeld suggested that torture was necessary and waterboarding isn’t really torture anyway, and a conspicuous lot of Republicans fell right in line, saying torture of terrorists (without due process) was acceptable, and waterboarding wasn’t even torture. My dad was among those toeing the Republican line, about which I was aghast.
So I went on deep dives into moral philosophy and dared to stare into the maw of Holocaust history. ::: Of note, the marks inside the genocide chambers at Auschwitz were victims were clawing at the walls as they died. :::
So when news of CECOT emerged only last week, I lost my mind, and to this hour I can’t think of a proper appropriate, rational response to such news. Alexei Yurchak, survivor of USSR and teacher at Berkeley talks of hypernormalization in which we humans tend to try to just conduct our normal everyday lives as civilization falls apart around us. Is that what people around me are doing? It’s hard to believe I’m overreacting.
I’m still beside myself about these events, and for now I’m distracting and avoiding thinking about them, which is really not a great response.
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