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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • 988 is not using any AI in conversations with callers to my knowledge. I know that some branches are looking at implementing AI for training purposes, to perhaps give more realistic simulation calls for trainers, but at no point should anybody calling 988 needing help encounter an AI. For the chat platform, I know that the messaging system has some automatic questions that it asks everyone at the very start of the conversation, but it’s a machine in the classic sense, and is not AI. Chat/Texters should not be encountering AI either.


  • 988 Worker here.

    Every single time someone asks me what we can do to fight the mental health epidemic in the U.S. and the rising suicide rates, I always always tell them the keys are workers rights, affordable housing, a healthcare system that doesn’t suck, all of this shit that the person asking typically doesn’t want.


  • I work for a mental health crisis line. We are taught, with extremity, to always go for least intrusive intervention possible. We will only ever call Emergency Services after a literal check list to ensure it’s the last resort possible.

    Practically the only times we ever call EMS on someone is if they tell us they are actively dying this very second, due to injury or overdose, etc. Or if they, after all of our attempts to listen, empathize, talk about what’s going on, talk about how they’re feeling tonight, work on what options there might be, who in their lives might be able to help, listing resources, and attempting to safety plan; if after all that, they say “yeah, I’m gonna kill myself specifically in this fashion and I’m gonna do it right now, and I have the means available to me.” Then hang up and don’t answer when we call back. Then we call EMS.

    It’s drilled into us that EMS is expensive for the person, and potentially dangerous because police are often not great at responding to Mental Health emergencies. So always the last last last resort.






  • I had a gym teacher who was not really interested in being a gym teacher. He was the varsity football coach and that was where his main focus was. Gym/Health class was basically the bare minimum health information required by curriculum, and then the rest of the time was spent in the weight room. Not even doing like, fun games or anything like that, literally just ‘weight room’ so that his athletes could just use the hour for their workout time.

    One day, after ‘weight room’ another student who was held back a bit (he had reached maybe 20 y.o. at this point, and hadn’t graduated) made a joke about wanting to shower with people. Nobody thought it was funny, we all ignored him. He takes offense to this, and decides to vent that frustration on me. He grabs me by the side of the head, and slams my head into the locker next to me. He does this within full view of the teacher, maybe ten feet away if that. I walk over to the teacher, holding my rapidly bruising face, and repeat to him what happened, literally what he just witnessed.

    He looked me in the eyes and said “Yeah, and?” and refused to do anything about it.

    I went to the Principal, who didn’t do anything. I went to the Vice Principal, who didn’t do anything, and then I went to the Dean of Students, who got that kid pulled from class for three days total. The next week I had a sit down with the Principal who apologized for what happened, but was oh so thankful that I was such an understanding kid, and could empathize with my assailant’s mental handicaps, and this didn’t need to go any further than it did, right?

    Shoulda sued.



  • I was told by a friend; watch all the way up through season 5, then sit for a couple weeks and don’t watch it for a while. Really think about if you want to keep going. Because the writers originally wrote the first 5 seasons to be a self contained story and it worked really well. Then the show was very successful, and they asked them to keep going. What ended up happening was they’d have single or double season long plots that just kinda rolled from one to another and had a bunch of escalation and flanderization going on. Like, in one season the big issue is The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. They deal with three of them, and then Death is the big badass. He’s the one they can’t actually beat. They spend an entire season leading up to him and trying to deal with him.

    Then, the very next season, that same super badass, Death himself, is in the way of something they want. Summoning, binding, and killing permanently this mega badass end season boss is all the effort of half of a fucking episode in the next season. The Flanderization is most obvious in Dean, where he goes from a dude who is characterized by typically masculine traits, and emphasizes that masculinity at times, to “Me Dean, me want burger! Me want pie!!”