Georgia officials are bracing for a potential increase in mental health calls as a new three-digit crisis hotline is set to go live on Saturday.
The number, which is simply 988, is an ambitious project that’s being rolled out across the nation. The goal is to curb the nation’s rise in mental health cases, substance abuse disorders, and suicides, at the same time relieve law enforcement who are often the first responders to mental health calls that are made to 911.
The success of the new hotline could be complicated by the labor worker shortage, and reports have indicated that call centers across the country are struggling to fill positions to staff the 988 line around the clock.
But Georgia state officials say they feel a step ahead of other states. The state already has a crisis call line: the Georgia Crisis and Access Line. Calls made to 988 will be routed into the existing system, and the state has been adding staff to keep up with the anticipated demand.
“Right now, we’re as ready as we can be. But when I talk about it to anyone, it’s really important for people to recognize this as the beginning of a major transformation of our system,” said Judy Fitzgerald, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities.
She compared the number to 911, which needed decades to work out all the kinks, and adjustments are still being made.
“We anticipate the same [for 988]. A lot of projections are out there, and it’s a bit unpredictable,” she said.
COVID-19 and resulting restrictions on daily life sparked a rise in mental health cases across the country. The pandemic also exposed cracks within the state and country’s fragile mental health systems, and the 988 hotline is intended to help.
According to the most recent publicly available data, Georgia has seen a 8.3% increase in rural suicides from 2019 to 2020, according to the Department of Public Health. From April 2020 to April 2021, the number of overdose deaths in Georgia have risen by 36%, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The state is also ranked No. 48 in the country for access to mental health care in 2022, according to Mental Health America. State lawmakers have made improving the system a top legislative priority, and a new law enacted this month aims to increase access to mental health and substance abuse care.
Anecdotally, police are also seeing an increase in mental health calls. Officer Tim Lupo, a public information officer with the Roswell Police Department, said that his officers often respond to multiple mental health calls each day.
“We always want to encourage people to continue to call us when there is a need there,” he said. “But there are certainly those other times where other mental health resources are a better direct point of contact. And when we can alleviate those [mental health] calls it just frees up our officers to be able to be more proactive in terms of crime prevention and community policing.”
988 in Georgia: How will it work?
Here’s how the new 988 hotline will work: A caller with a Georgia area code will be sent to a trained crisis responder, who will then make a decision on how to handle the call based on the severity of the caller’s situation.
For example, the staffer might be able to de-escalate a situation over the phone, or direct the person to services. In other cases, they will send out a team to help the caller or plan to have them admitted to one of the state’s crisis units.
Initial projections show that call volumes to the 988 number could increase by as much as 100% by the end of the first year. Since those projections were made, some aspects of the number’s rollout have changed: for example, there will no longer be a national marketing campaign for 988 until July 2023.
Call volumes could potentially double, from about 275,000 calls, text and chats recorded from July 1, 2020 to June 30, 2021, to about 564,608 calls, text and chats for this fiscal year that began July 1. Over that same time frame, mobile crisis responses and admissions to crisis beds could potentially double. These figures are from earlier projections, and could be lower.
But, if those projections bear out, costs to the state could increase by as much as $283.6 million annually.
Georgia has already made a number of changes, such as adding beds to existing crisis units in Augusta and Columbus as well as improving GPS technology so that first responders can more easily get to the person who is in crisis.
But that’s in the short-term. Over a longer time frame, the state may need to actually build additional crisis units. The state also eventually wants to make it so 911 staffers can easily transfer a mental health call to 988.
Eventually, the goal is that 988 will be as recognizable of an emergency number as 911.
“The hope is that over the course of time, it really gets socialized that if this is a mental health or addiction crisis, you know that 988 is your number to call,” Fitzgerald said.
About the Author
