This call, and how it was handled, demonstrated teamwork between a
community suicide prevention resource and military and civil service
administrators on a military base. Comparable groundbreaking was
going on in other military-civilian communities and contexts.
Family Problem
The Base Chaplain called me at home late one Sunday night and said
he'd had a phone call from a hotline worker at the community SPS. The
SPS worker had asked for his help in a call that had come in from an
airman's wife. She had phoned the SPS from her home off-base and
threatened to kill her husband and then commit suicide.
The caller to the SPS had impulsively terminated the call to the SPS after
a few minutes, but in her responses to questions at the outset of the
interview, had given her phone number to the crisis worker. After she
hung up, the crisis worker judged the woman was more than moderately
lethal, and also that she might listen to a military Chaplain. That brought
on the call to the Base Chaplain.
After getting the specifics from the crisis worker, the Chaplain phoned
the woman and talked to her for about 10 minutes before she hung up on
him too.
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