Mental health experts have said that the 988 hotline for mental health emergencies is still a work in progress, in need of more funding, coordination and awareness.
More than 10 million calls, texts and chat messages have been answered by counselors working for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline’s three-digit hotline in the two years since it debuted, federal officials said on Tuesday.
The three-digit number, 988, was introduced in 2022 as a way to simplify emergency calls and help a metastasizing mental health crisis in the United States, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the social environments of younger Americans. The hotline previously used a traditional 10-digit number.
“People who felt like they didn’t have any other options got what they needed,” Andrea Palm, the deputy secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, said at a news briefing on Tuesday. The 988 line, Ms. Palm said, had resulted in “countless stories of real people whose lives have been changed forever.”
The 988 network has been a rare instance of bipartisanship in federal health policy. President Donald J. Trump in 2020 signed the law establishing the new number, and the Biden administration has implemented and expanded the network of more than 200 call centers, which typically operate around the clock.
A growing number of adults in the United States have reported feeling more anxious. Federal officials on Tuesday cited a 2022 national survey that found that more than 12 million adults and nearly 3.5 million adolescents had seriously considered suicide in the previous year. Roughly one in five adolescents reported symptoms of depression or anxiety in a federal survey of teen health from 2021 to 2022.
The condensed phone number was meant to function as a more memorable option for emergency calls, similar to 911. Yet only around a quarter of Americans are at least somewhat familiar with 988, according to a poll released this week by Ipsos and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.