“I am still very worried about you. “” What’s your psychiatrist’s name? “” The two of us will get there. “Headsets on the ears, four” answering “receive calls received at 3114. Barely put into service, Friday at 9 am, the national suicide prevention number, launched from Lille, received its first calls.
Available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, this new free number is dedicated to people with suicidal thoughts but also to their loved ones and to those bereaved by suicide.
A center in each region by 2022
The project is coordinated from the Lille University Hospital. “We already have 10 to 15 calls”, notes around 11 am Doctor Pierre Grandgenevre, psychiatrist responsible for training “respondents”, who will eventually be 300 nationwide. Similar centers opened in several regions on Friday. Each region should have its own in early 2022.
The national suicide prevention strategy aims to “arrive at a break in the curve of deaths by suicide”, explains Professor Pierre Thomas, head of the psychiatry center of the University Hospital of Lille and national coordinator of the project. “These are preventable deaths,” he insists.
A logic of intervention and action
The new issue complements earlier devices, such as VigilanS, created in 2015, which tracks people who have attempted suicide. Compared to the other helplines, often volunteers, this one “has more a logic of intervention and action, in particular in the rescue thanks to a very close collaboration with the Samu”, explains the psychiatrist.
The people who call can remain anonymous if they wish, but “since it is a question of having concrete support actions, we will endeavor to lift the anonymity”.
“Everything was ready, she knew where, when and how (to take action)”
The launch of this line comes a few days after the Conference on Mental Health and Psychiatry, during which President Emmanuel Macron announced measures for a sector which had said it was “on the verge of implosion”, without completely satisfy the actors.
From the first morning of 3114, Nancy Roque, a nurse trained as a “responder”, received a very heavy call from a lady “in distress”. “Everything was ready, she knew where, when, how (to take action)”, explains the caregiver. “It’s not easy because people find it difficult to give us information such as their address. And we don’t have the physical, only the intonations of the voice, the words we use, to keep them online, safe, and at the same time find a solution for the care ”. Respondents, nurses or psychologists, can work in duplicate for particularly complicated calls.
Soon a chat service
“We are really happy with the arrival of this device because it was one of the missing stones”, rejoices Patrick Goldstein, the boss of the Samu du Nord, which welcomes this new service in its premises. “Today a lot of calls like this arrive in the Samus: ‘I’m going to take action’, ‘I’m having dark thoughts’. And we don’t know how to do it. It’s a job and we don’t have time. What we want is not to intervene: when we intervene (…) it is because we have missed something, ”he explains.
In 2022, the 3114 should be enriched with a “chat” service. Its creators also want to make it accessible to people with disabilities and prisoners, by including this number among those authorized inside prisons.
With around 9,000 suicides per year, France has “one of the highest rates in Europe”, according to Public Health France.