Crisis center callers growing desperate as economy drags

The woman on the other end of the phone was desperate.

A recent widow, she was watching her utility bills devour what little money she had.

"She said that if she was unable to get help, she was going to kill herself," said Christy Stanford, who took the call at the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay.

Stanford spent the new few minutes trying to keep the woman on the phone, to calm her down, to turn her thoughts toward things worth living for.

"You never know what to say," Stanford said. "You just hope you don't say the wrong thing. It's hard to sit in that emotional space with them."

For thousands of Tampa Bay residents, the economic downturn continues to strain household finances and people's mental health.

In Hillsborough County alone, 15 percent of working-age adults and nearly a quarter of children are living in poverty, according to recent figures from the U.S. Census Bureau. Median household incomes are down for the third year in a row. About a third of full-time workers have no health insurance, as do two-thirds of part-time workers.

As a result, Stanford has been talking a lot of people out of harming themselves lately. The counselor is part of a team that responds to people dialing 211 for help.

In Hillsborough County, that number connects callers with a white office building near Bearss and Florida avenues. Behind a door labeled "Quiet Room," Stanford and other counselors get a daily dose of the misery overtaking thousands of Tampa Bay area residents.

The crisis center is a nonprofit group that helps with everything from paying bills to sexual assaults. Lately, workers there have gotten very busy on all fronts.

"As soon as you log onto the system, your phone rings nonstop," Stanford said. "We're so busy now that all of us will be on calls, and there will be 10 calls waiting."

Outside of Hillsborough County, separate 211 centers serve residents in Pasco and Polk counties, while the Pinellas County center also serves Hernando and Citrus counties.

When Stanford started at the Hillsborough crisis center 18 months ago, her calls were mostly from people seeking information: where to go for help with utility bills, where to get free medical care, where to find food pantries.

Those calls are still a big part of what 211 operators handle, but callers have become more desperate since last year.

"We get a lot of people who call saying 'I've been living without electricity for a month' in the depth of summer," Stanford said. "They're just exhausted."

This year, the center has averaged more than 11,000 calls a month. That's up about 10 percent from 2010, when the numbers were up 10 percent from the year before.

At the Hillsborough 211 center, 60 percent of the calls are from Hillsborough County, with the highest concentrations coming from East Tampa and Brandon. The rest come from drug abuse and suicide hotlines across the state, said Debra Harris, who oversees the Hillsborough 211 system and suicide prevention program.

With federal unemployment checks set to end by early 2012, crisis center officials expect the calls for help to climb beyond 12,000 a month, Harris said

Many more of those calls are likely to come from middle-aged, middle-class people struggling to adapt to life without a job or with part-time work. About 20 percent of 211 callers this year earn enough to put them above the federal poverty line, a sign they've kept their jobs but now make less money or work fewer hours, crisis center officials say.

"The face of our callers is changing," Harris said. "Over the last couple years, we are seeing people calling us who in the past haven't been in a position to ask for help."

Often, those new callers have tried to bootstrap their way out of their problems and failed.

"By the time they push those buttons [on the phone], they're in such a deep hole," Harris said. "Because they've tried to do it without support, they're in real trouble."

For those who need it, the crisis center offers financial advice. Following that advice can mean abandoning things – cable TV, an expensive car – people have worked to enjoy. It can be a hard adjustment.

"They are accustomed to having these things," Harris said. "They need to start downsizing."

Crisis center clients aren't the only ones who need help, though.

Carrying the burden of other people's troubles can be exhausting for crisis center workers, said Meggen Sixbey, a University of Florida professor of counseling education. She works with the university's campus suicide prevention program and a community crisis center in Gainesville.

"It's a lot of stress," she said.

The barrage of misery and pain can burn people out in about two years, Sixbey said. For that reason, it's important crisis center workers find ways to relieve stress. Counselors also need to watch out for each other, she said.

"One thing co-workers will notice is that a person is sighing all the time," Sixbey said.

Crisis center workers can also find themselves irritable and short-tempered if they let their jobs get to them, she said.

Stanford said she and her colleagues at the Hillsborough crisis center keep an eye out for each other, offering a sounding board when needed.

But it can still be hard to bear witness to the economic stress eating away at the community, Stanford said. She wonders sometimes what happens to the people she helps after they hang up the phone.

The suicidal widow, for example, agreed to let Stanford check in with her by phone a few days after their conversation.

"But by then," Stanford said, "her phone had been turned off."