809: The Call

This American Life

Society & Culture, News, Politics, Arts

4.6 • 88.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One call to a very unusual hotline, and everything that followed.

Prologue: Ira talks about a priest who set up what may have been the first hotline in the United States. It was just him, answering a phone, trying to help strangers who called. (2 minutes)
Act One: The Never Use Alone hotline was set up so that drug users can call if they are say, using heroin by themselves. Someone will stay on the line with them in case they overdose. We hear the recording of one call, from a woman named Kimber. (13 minutes)
Act Two: An EMT learns he was connected to the call, in more ways than he realized. (16 minutes)
Act Three: Jessie, who took the call, explains how she discovered the hotline. She keeps in touch with Kimber. Until one day, Kimber disappears. (16 minutes)
Act Four: We learn what happened to Kimber after she called the line. (10 minutes)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeaped in today's episode of the show.
0:05.5	If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.
0:10.6	From WBZChicago to Samaritan Life, I'm our glass.
0:15.3	Okay, so you call Hotline, and then a complete stranger tries to figure out how to help you,
0:20.7	on the spot.
0:22.4	That idea seems to have begun in the 1950s.
0:25.0	The first suicide hotline in the United States was created in the early 60s by a guy in San
0:29.1	Francisco, who was a priest and also a journalist, and it was just him answering the phone
0:34.3	at first.
0:35.3	Adds on matchbooks and sides of buses said, thinking of ending it all?
0:39.9	Call Bruce.
0:40.9	Which by the way, it was not his real name, his real name was Bernard Mays, but of course
0:46.7	the power of anonymity is so important to any hotline.
0:51.9	People would call, and sometimes he could help them precisely because he had no connection
0:55.6	to their life at all.
0:57.2	Like they could say anything to him.
1:00.2	And there's pre-internet days that was completely new to harness that kind of anonymity,
1:05.5	the intimacy of it, this way, over the phone.
1:10.7	These days of course there are all kinds of hotlines for people in all sorts of situations.
1:14.6	Prayer hotlines, psychic hotlines, also hotlines for homework help, for new moms, there's
1:20.4	a hotline for owners of three-legged dogs, and another one specifically for anybody who
1:24.7	swells on it.
	...

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