Regional (Local) Suicide Hotlines
This was one of those pages I really wasn't sure how I was going to handle right up to the point that it is the last page I am typing before I upload this some 50+ page website onto the Internet. Then it came to me. We will use the Internet to help us again right now.
As an example, I just googled the following:
"talking rock" georgia suicide hotlines
Nothing. Nada. Not one return on my search. The importance of that observation would be that someone in crisis just might not have the presence of mind to go any further in their search..
The next step was to try other close, slightly larger towns. Changing Talking Rock to Atlanta finally yielded me some decent results. After that, one needs to just try calling the available local and 800 numbers until success comes in the form of a comforting human voice on the other end of the line.
ACSO We more often than not probably know if we will eventually find ourselves or someone we love in need of speaking on the phone to someone at a suicide crisis hotline. It would be better to do the searching for several working local and/or 800 phone numbers now so that they will already be handy if anything were ever to happen down the road. I suggest having several numbers available because you just never want to have all your eggs in one basket, so to speak..
Advocacy Opportunity One of the things that I have found in my own personal experiences is that there are many, many pages of outdated materials out there on the Internet. If you have the inclination, you might find a way to politely help others continue to update their materials so that someone in crisis late, late at night can find just what they need on the first couple of keystrokes.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the opportunity is out there to find webmasters who wouldn't mind someone volunteering to help them keep their materials, meaning in particular the many local access suicide crisis hotlines and related, up to date. If you find someone receptive to your offer of assistance, you might also help them add smaller towns such as our Talking Rock here in Georgia to appropriate local access number webpages that may already be online and high in Internet search engine rankings.
Advocacy Opportunity With my observation of Talking Rock not pulling up online AT ALL with respect to the availability of local hotlines, another opportunity for advocacy would be to develop a new database that does include all of Small Town America in hotline resources.. The software to create just such an extended project already exists out there, some even for free for download off of the Internet (e.g. MySQL).. The harder part would be in finding either the funding or the availability of the quantity of volunteer time it would take to pull off developing a trustworthy (i.e. 100% verified) database successfully..
Web Design: