Welcome to the Mad in America podcast, your source for science, psychiatry, and social justice.

All right, hello everybody. Welcome to MIA Radio. I'm Karin Gervert, and the MIA audience might actually know me more as the arts editor at Madden America.

But I've actually also been working on this suicide hotline transparency project for about a year.

And today I am extremely excited to be interviewing Yana Kalalu and Jameel Roberts from the Trans Lifeline.

And they'll be introducing themselves a little bit more in one second.

But first, I just want to say that this interview is part of a series of conversations.

It's the second one, the first one being with Vanessa

Green from the Black Line, called the Black Line, which is up on MIA website. But these interviews

are going to be conducted over the next few months around this issue of call tracing and non-consensual intervention of

suicide hotlines. So the project has a few different parts and ways that you can participate,

so you can check that out on Mad America's website. And so we'll just get right into it.

All right. So how about you to introduce yourself?

So yeah, my name is Jamel Roberts.

I don't use any pronouns, and I'm a black queer person,

and I am existing just on the gender spectrum.

I'm currently serving as the interim hotline manager at Trans Lifeline, and my work is to build practices of connection.

My goal is to shift the ways that we approach peer support by censoring the relationships that we build through the service that we provide.

I think that through this lens, we're able to focus on how people relate

to one another and gathering to work and sharing purpose and by encouraging analysis and curiosity

while building trust. We encourage one another to create language and to name and address the

impacts of systemic harm and to nurture

individual and collective growth and healing.

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