Suicide Hotlines: Putting People On Hold And Hanging Up!

If someone feels like they need immediate help and decide to call a hotline, the last thing they want is to be put on hold.

A few TikTok creators have shared their experiences with calling the suicide hotline just to not have anyone answer, be put on hold, or even hung up on -and it sadly happens way more often than you might think.

Karly, a TikTok creator, recently shared her experience of calling the suicide hotline last year and the frustrating thing that happened.

"So last year, I called the suicide hotline cause I was having like the worst time of my life and wanted help," she said. "And I googled all these resources and I found this phone number, so I called."

She was "hysterically crying" on the floor in the bathroom because she didn't know what to do and felt like she couldn't see a future. Karly was desperate for help.

"I just need to call this number. Somebody's gonna help me, somebody's gonna help me, whatever," she continued. "I'm sitting there, ring, ring, ring, ring, ring, phone's ringing forever. Finally, somebody picks up the phone."

The person on the phone told Karly she was going to be put on hold for a second. While on hold, it was just silence, no music or anything. And the hold time ended up being way longer than "one second."

"I'm sitting there and I'm like...nobody's coming back to talk to me," she said. "And I sit there and I just start laughing, and I just can't stop laughing. I'm like laughing hysterically because I'm like, this is ridiculous. This is absolutely insane. I am calling the suicide hotline and you guys put me on hold?"

That's when Karly decided to just hang up the phone. She then got up wondering if that was "the purpose," but it "worked."

Karly's video quickly went viral with more than 2 million views and nearly 4,000 comments. It appears that way too many people also had a frustrating experience calling the suicide hotline.

"They hung up on me once," one person wrote. Quite a few people replied, "Me too" and "Same" to that comment. One responded, "Mine sent the police to my house."

A former hotline operator shared the reason it can be hard to get a person on the phone to talk to.

"As someone who used to work for the hotline, sometimes there would only be 3 of us in the centers and we would get 100s of calls. I’m sorry. We tried our best," she wrote. When asked why she feels they are understaffed, she replied, "Because the job is really mentally hard. I still think about some of the calls and it’s been years."

One viewer shared a shocking story of a time she called the hotline. "One time I called during such a low point and in the middle of talking the guy goes 'I’m going to have to let you go. We have a more serious situation.' The way my jaw dropped."

Another person shared, "I called on a weekend and was told to call back on Monday."

One other person wrote, "I was on hold for the longest, someone finally answered, I'm venting, and after a certain amount of time they said 'the time is up, I hope you feel better' and hung up."

Karly was clearly not alone in her frustration and confusion over calling the hotline. If the comment section of her video didn't prove that, then another TikToker, Alicia, who goes by @pureanixety on the app, probably did.

"I've called the hotline two or three times before in my life and none of those were good experiences," she began her story. "I called the hotline and the phone rang for probably 10 or more minutes. And when I finally got a hold of somebody, they hung up on me."

Alicia said after being hung up on, she just stared at the phone, but eventually started to laugh because "the suicide hotline just hung up on me."

A more recent phone call to the hotline had the woman on the line asking her if she planned to end her life and she said, "No, I'm just trying not to get to that point and I feel like I'm going to."

"The woman told me it was a crisis hotline and if I wasn't in a crisis, I should just call a friend," she concluded her story.

Sadly, having trouble getting help on a suicide hotline doesn't seem to be an isolated incident to just Karly, Alicia and a few viewers. More people shared their shocking stories in the comment section of Alicia's video.

"I called the hotline crying and saying I wanna disconnect and they said 'we don't talk to crying people' and HUNG UP," one person wrote.

Another said, "The hotline bullied me out of my crisis by saying I was taking up too much of their time and I should stop grabbing for attention." Alicia replied saying, "The amount of people that had the same thing said to them is mind boggling. I actually could not fathom saying that someone who’s struggling."

Another viewer shared, "The first time I called the lady was like 'is there anyone you can talk to about how you’re feeling?' Lady if there was do you think I’d be calling."

One other person shared, "Called the hotline once while in a crisis, explained my situation to him, and the man on the line told me I was 'too far gone for therapy to help.' I immediately hung up. Never called again."

TikTok creator Chelsey Lee also stitched Karly's video and shared her experience calling the suicide hotline, captioning it, "I’ve had good experiences with the hotline but this was not one of them."

"I called the suicide hotline once when I had just gotten out of inpatient and I was just having a really, really, really terrible night and I had been drinking a little bit, so I don't really remember what I said to them," she said. "But I remember I was like, I need to call this number."

She thinks she upset the guy on the phone somehow and while he was trying to encourage her to not end her life, she continued to say she wanted to.

"And I must have done it or been too non-receptive because he was like, 'Fine, just do it. Just do it then,'" she continued. "I just started laughing."