My first call to 988

This is a composite story, drawn from common experiences shared in the schizophrenia community. It does not depict a real individual.

I am a 34-year-old woman living alone in Minneapolis. I have had schizophrenia since I was 22. I have a job, an apartment, a cat, and a treatment team I trust. I have a written crisis plan taped to the inside of my kitchen cabinet that lists, in order, who to call when I am in trouble. The first line on that plan is the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. For seven years I had that plan and never called the number. The night I finally did it, I almost did not. I want to write about what that call was actually like, because the gap between knowing the number and dialing it was the hardest distance I have ever crossed.

The week leading up to the call

It started, as it usually does for me, with sleep. I had been sleeping four or five hours a night for about a week. My voices, which had been mostly quiet for two years on a long-acting injection, started to come back in the form of two whispering at the edges of my hearing. They were not commanding anything, but they were there. I noticed I was checking the locks more than once. I noticed I was reading the same paragraph of a book five times.

By the seventh day, I was sitting on my couch at 11 p.m. on a Thursday, holding my phone, and I could not decide whether what I was experiencing was a normal bad week or the beginning of a relapse. I had a follow-up appointment with my psychiatrist scheduled for the next Tuesday. Five days felt like a long time. The voices got louder. I cried for forty minutes about something I could not name.

The five minutes before the call

I knew the number. I had it written in three places. I had read about it. I had seen the SAMHSA factsheet on the 988 service and I knew, intellectually, that it was for exactly this kind of moment — a moment that was not 911-level but was past my ability to handle alone.

What kept me from dialing was a list of small fears that, written down, look ridiculous:

• What if they sent the police to my apartment?
• What if I sounded fine and they thought I was wasting their time?
• What if I sounded too bad and they hospitalized me against my will?
• What if my voice cracked and I could not get the words out?
• What if there was a hold time and I gave up?

I sat with the phone for about twenty minutes. I made tea. I came back to the couch. I dialed.

The call itself

It rang twice. There was a short pre-recorded message — about eight seconds — and then a person picked up. Her name was Maria. She asked what was happening. I started crying again. She said, "Take your time. I am here."

I told her I had schizophrenia, that I had been losing sleep for a week, that my voices were back, that I was not in immediate danger but I was scared. She did not panic. She did not interrupt. She asked clarifying questions in a way that made me feel like she had heard the words "I have schizophrenia" before — because of course she had. We talked for about thirty minutes.

What she actually did:

• Asked, gently and directly, whether I was thinking about hurting myself. I was not. She said she had to ask. I appreciated that.
• Helped me name what was happening — increased voices, sleep loss, anxiety — without trying to diagnose me.
• Asked who was on my treatment team and whether I could reach my psychiatrist before Tuesday. I had not even tried; I had assumed I could not.
• Walked me through grounding — five things I could see, four I could touch, three I could hear.
• Stayed on the line until my breathing slowed.
• Asked what my plan was for the rest of the night.

By the end of the call, I had a concrete plan: I would take the trazodone my psychiatrist had given me for emergencies, I would call her office in the morning at 8 a.m. for an earlier appointment, and I would call 988 back if things got worse. Maria did not send anyone. She did not arrange a hospitalization. She did not threaten to. She helped me get through the next eight hours.

What I learned from that call

988 is not 911

The single biggest misconception I had — and that I think most people in our community share — is that calling 988 means losing control of what happens next. It does not. The vast majority of 988 calls end with the caller still at home, with a plan. According to SAMHSA, fewer than 2% of 988 calls result in any kind of in-person dispatch. The default is a conversation. Most of the people on the other end are trained crisis counselors, not law enforcement.

Calling earlier is better than calling later

I had been holding 988 in reserve for some imagined worse moment. Maria was clear: this was the right time. The point of the line is to interrupt the slide. Catching a wobble at the whisper stage is exactly what 988 is designed for. I had been treating it like a doomsday button, when it is closer to a smoke alarm.

Identifying yourself helps

I told Maria, in the first sixty seconds, that I had schizophrenia and was on a long-acting injection. That gave her a frame. The conversation could go faster because she was not trying to figure out what kind of crisis this was. People with serious mental illness sometimes worry that disclosing the diagnosis will make the counselor more cautious or more likely to escalate. In my experience the opposite happened. She knew what she was working with.

You can ask for what you need

Halfway through the call I said, "I do not want anyone sent to my apartment. I just need to talk." Maria said, "That is what we are doing. We are talking." She did not have to send anyone. She could just be a voice in my ear for thirty minutes while my nervous system came back down.

What changed in my apartment after that call

I made a few small changes the next morning. I put 988 as the first contact in my phone, labeled "988 — Talk." I added it to the lock screen photo. I told my therapist about the call at our next appointment, and we talked through what had happened so I would feel even more ready to call again. I told my psychiatrist, who adjusted my plan to include a slightly higher emergency dose of trazodone for sleep loss. I did not need a hospitalization. The week passed.

What I would say to someone holding the phone

• You do not need to be in immediate danger to call. Loneliness, voices, fear, sleep loss, panic — all of it is enough.
• You can hang up at any point. There is no obligation to stay on the line.
• You can ask the counselor to keep the call between the two of you and not dispatch anyone. They will tell you honestly what they can and cannot do.
• If you do not want to talk, you can text 988 instead. The text line is staffed by the same network of trained counselors. See our 988 deep dive for more.
• If voice calls and English are hard, there are Spanish-language counselors and an LGBTQ+ youth line. Press the relevant prompt at the start of the call.

I am not going to pretend the call fixed everything. I still had a hard week. But I had it with a plan and with the knowledge that there was a person in a building somewhere who had taken thirty minutes to make sure I was okay. That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, the whole point.

For more, see building a crisis coping plan, warm lines versus hotlines, and our overview of the 988 lifeline.

This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified mental health professional. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.