THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 29, 1995 TAG: 9505270066
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JANIE BRYANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 227 lines
BINGO WASN'T just a harmless pastime anymore. The woman was sinking deeper and deeper into the jaws of gambling addiction.
Her debts were out of control. Bad checks were about to bounce. She was beginning to see suicide as the only way out.
In desperation, she reached out to a stranger.
Jean Corley, a veteran volunteer at the Suicide-Crisis Center, remembers telling the woman that most problems don't last forever.
Suicide does.
Not alone with her problems anymore, the woman began to talk about other options. She decided to own up to the bad checks and her gambling problem.
That woman was just one of many thousands who have reached for the phone in times of trouble.
For 25 years, the Suicide-Crisis Center has been there for callers in distress.
Its phones are passed like a torch from volunteer to volunteer, around the clock, 365 days a year. Volunteers take about 2,000 calls a month.
Within the next two weeks, the agency expects to log its half-millionth call.
Based in Portsmouth - its exact location is a secret - the Suicide-Crisis Center serves all of Hampton Roads as well as Suffolk, Franklin and Isle of Wight and Southampton counties.
Suicide calls are the most feared by new volunteers but actually represent a small percentage of the calls that come into the center. In 1994, about 600 of 23,137 calls were suicide-related.
Volunteers hear about every type of human dilemma. They hear from the homeless, the hungry, the abused. They hear from alcoholics and drug addicts who have worn the patience of their own friends and loved ones.
They talk to people who don't know who else to call.
Corley doesn't remember if the woman caller had tried to talk to friends or family before calling the Crisis Center. Many of the center's callers don't.
Bonnie Durham, the agency's executive director, remembers one man especially.
``This person was calling here because he felt so alone, that there was nobody who cared about him . . . yet I could hear people all through the house and music in the background,'' Durham said.
At times, the man even interrupted the call to speak to a family member that had come into the room.
They had no idea he was on the line with a suicide-prevention counselor. Durham finally convinced him to put one of his family members on the phone.
``Ultimately, those people turned out to be the caller's main resource,'' Durham said.
But it took a faceless voice on the phone to tell them that someone they loved was in trouble.
Durham uses the call in training sessions because it illustrates the isolation people feel when they reach that point.
``Sometimes it's the people we love the most that we tune out, because we don't want to hear that kind of painful message,'' she said. ``We don't do that in a knowing way, but certainly all of us do it.''
On a recent weeknight, two volunteers gear up for their shift in the agency's upstairs office. The sun is going down and only a faint breeze is breathing through open windows that give a generous view of lush, green treetops.
It seems more like a treehouse getaway than a suicide-prevention and crisis-intervention center.
Between calls, the volunteers - Sandra Jumba and Gloria Anderson - will catch up on one another's lives and flip through gardening magazines, sometimes stopping to show the other a glossy photo of some dream garden.
But this relaxed atmosphere will be all too often interrupted by the problems of the outside world.
Sometime before 7, a teenage boy calls and pours out his heart, after telling Jumba he doesn't want to live anymore. He doesn't feel like his parents listen or care. Jumba stays on the phone with him a long time. The call ends after he decides he will talk to a counselor.
``A nice kid,'' she says, shaking her head sadly. She's had many such conversations.
``We get 8- and 9-year-olds that say they want to kill themselves,'' she adds.
The phones are ringing faster now. Agencies that contract with the center to take after-hours calls are phoning in to transfer their calls. At night, the Suicide-Crisis Center takes calls for several cities' mental health agencies, child protective service workers and the United Way Helpline.
Anderson gets a call from a concerned citizen who wants to report an abusive parent. Another woman calls because she is afraid she has a sexually transmitted disease and doesn't know who to ask about her symptoms.
The two volunteers delve into the center's resource files until they find the number for a national hotline.
Anderson gets a call from a man at a phone booth who has nowhere to stay for the night. Again the two women pour over the resource files, making calls to several shelters with no success. Most of the churches that open their doors to the homeless during the worst of winter stop doing so once the weather warms.
The Union Mission, the Dwelling Place and the Judeo-Christian Outreach Center have filled up for the night. A couple of shelter representatives suggest other options. Tell him to go to a hospital emergency room and stay in the waiting room, one says; the airport, another suggests.
One of the volunteer's frustrations is that there isn't always a solution.
There are more than 1,000 resources to which the center can refer people. Volunteers learn how to access all of them. They also learn that there are not enough.
Jumba hears from a regular caller, a man who suffers from schizophrenia. He calls like an old friend who must check in with people who have been there for him for years.
Anderson talks to a parent upset about an uncontrollable child.
Sometime after 10 o'clock, things get quiet again. Anderson goes back to her magazine.
Anderson, 45, began volunteering at the Suicide-Crisis Center in the fall as a practicum for her graduate counseling studies at Regent University. About one-third of the volunteers are college students or professionals from related fields. The rest come from all walks of life - cab drivers, television executives, engineers, Navy personnel and secretaries.
Many have had family members or friends who have taken their lives, or at least tried. Some have been the desperate voice on the other end of the phone. Grateful, they heal and come to the place where they can give back something they received.
Jumba, 40, a customer representative from Portsmouth, signed up as a volunteer seven years ago.
``I thought . . . nobody has problems like that and if you do, you don't call somebody and talk about it,'' she said. ``I wasn't prepared for what came.
``You get a lot of people that are just lonely or scared and confused and depressed. And you do get the ones sitting there with the gun in their hands .
She remembers one man who called her from a hotel room.
``I think he went through with it,'' she said. ``He gave me about five minutes, and I went through everything that I should have. He said, `No, no, no. . . . I just wanted to say goodbye.' ''
Some volunteers stay for years, others burn out. Some drop out during training, realizing they aren't right for the job. Sometimes, Durham can tell right away. Like those who tell her they want to volunteer because ``they give good advice.''
``That's not what we do here,'' Durham said.
Volunteers are trained to be good listeners, knowledgable about available resources - but also trained to help the person in crisis find a solution.
Durham admitted that that can be difficult. It's not easy to talk to a mother who has nothing to feed her children without wanting to jump in a car and take her a bag of groceries. But any volunteer who crosses that line and makes personal contact with a caller is dismissed.
``There are other ways of helping . . . digging out every resource, empowering, not rescuing,'' Durham said.
For Jean Corley, the most difficult calls to take are those from the homeless, who often have children.
``I remember one night a young girl called,'' Corley said. ``She was in downtown Portsmouth. She didn't have anywhere to go, and she didn't want to get involved with the police - for whatever reason.''
It was almost 11 p.m., the end of Corley's shift, and it would have been so easy to go pick up the girl.
``I think she was 12 or 13 years old,'' said Corley, 61, a civil service worker from Chesapeake. ``It was cold and she was outside. And I really don't know what happened.''
The girl did have some money, so Corley gave her a couple of places to call and asked the girl to call back the next day and leave a message that she was all right.
She didn't.
That's often the case with volunteer workers, never knowing if they helped or not. They learn to leave it behind when their shift is over. They learn that they can't save everybody.
They also learn to check their own values at the door. Callers have to know that they can talk free of judgment. It's the reason many are more willing to share troubles with a stranger.
Jumba got put to the test the day a 13-year-old girl called, depressed about her life.
``She was having problems in school. Nobody liked her, the teacher was against her, the guidance counselor was against her,'' Jumba recalled, reeling off the list of problems.
``Her life just was not going well, and she said, `To top all that off, I started my period and I really wanted to be pregnant.' ''
Jumba managed to reign in her own beliefs. This was about that girl's values, she said.
``She wanted a baby,'' Jumba said. ``It was important to her.''
But by the time the girl finished talking, she had decided that she wanted to finish school and get things worked out with her parents and teachers. She had decided to look into after-school counseling.
That teenager was typical of callers who really just need someone to hear them.
Looking back over the years since that first phone rang 25 years ago, Durham is amazed by how diverse and far-reaching the Crisis Center has become.
``Truly, in the beginning, the expectation was that the Suicide-Crisis Center would be taking calls from very depressed or suicidal people,'' Durham said.
``That was an interesting phenomenon,'' she said. ``People were calling and having a need to talk about what was going on in their lives, but almost apologizing that they were not suicidal.''
They just needed to talk to somebody, she said, and they would begin with, ``Is it OK? . . . What kind of crises do you deal with?''
For 25 years, the volunteers have had one answer:
It's OK. We're listening. MEMO: MORE INFO
The Suicide-Crisis Center service, started by the Junior Woman's Club
of Portsmouth in 1970, receives funding from United Way of South Hampton
Roads and the state. The center serves all of Hampton Roads, including
Suffolk, Franklin, Isle of Wight and Southampton Counties.
In addition to the suicide prevention and crisis intervention calls,
volunteers take after-hours calls for mental health and substance abuse
programs in four cities; child protective service workers in Virginia
Beach and for the United Way Helpline.
Volunteers must be 21 - or 18, if they are working toward a related
college degree. Training includes 24 hours in the classroom and
additional on-site observation and monitoring. For information on
volunteering, call 399-6395.
The Suicide-Crisis Center hotline number is 399-6393.
FUND-RAISER
The Crisis Center will hold its first fundraiser - a barbecue picnic
- from 1 p.m. to sunset July 23 at Portsmouth City Park.
Tickets are on sale at $12.50 for adults and $7.50 for children.
For more information, call 393-0502.
ILLUSTRATION: LIFELINES
BETH BERGMAN/Staff photos
Jean Corley
Bonnie Durham
Sandra Jumba
The Suicide-Crisis Center hotline number is 399-6393.
by CNB