Cop Talks Suicidal Man off Parking Garage Ledge

Today I saw the ominous heading in the Times Union online listing, "Cop Talks Man off Parking Garage Ledge," and of course I opened it.  Reading through it, I thought to myself:  "oh thank goodness he had been trained in crisis intervention, thank goodness he was calm, patient and understanding.... 90 minutes, yes, that's about how long it takes..." 

In short, a cop was called to the Crowne Plaza parking lot tower in the early hours of this morning.  He found the man perched on the top level, threatening to jump.  He spoke to him for one and a half hours and in the end the man accepted help and was transported by Mobile Crisis to a medical facility for followup help.

The description of the man's problems was familiar to me and in fact to all of us who work at our center on the crisis lines (direct quote):

"The man told Dorsey [the cop]that he had been diagnosed with serious depression and that his mother had passed away recently. He said he was upset because he was unemployed and could not find a job. The man also said his medications and therapy were not working and he had decided he was going to take his life."

These are life situations we hear about every day on the phones. The pain of life, the feeling that things will not get better, the hopelessness and lonliness of the human condition - are all the essence of the calls received at our call center - 2-1-1, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and the (local) CONTACT Lifeline (formerly known as the Samaritans Crisis Hotline). 

Some of the real call situations we have received in the past week include:  a woman trying to support a family of seven on a minimum wage job, an older man who is unemployed and prospects of finding a new job slim, a woman who has cancer and is worried about about how her daughter will cope after she is gone and a man living with schitozphrenia who is lonely and depressed and has no one else to talk to.

So the themes of loss, depression, unemployment and medications are familiar to us. 

This man could have been one of our callers.  Indeed, I have spoken to people on the phone that I could not be so assured of the outcome.  Since they were on mobile phones or the number was blocked, we were unfortunately unable to send help to them.  To this day, I am left unknowing what happened to them after they hung up, the real possibility lingering that I might have been the last person they spoke to before they died. 

In other cases, we have talked to a sobbing woman for over an hour, helping her talk through her sorrow and hopelessness until she put the pills away.  We have also spoken to the man who was threatening to hang himself but stayed on the phone long enough to change his mind accept our suggestion that we send emergency help to him for a transport to the hospital.  In this call, the last person our volunteer spoke to was a police officer, thanking us for making the call and assuring us the man would be taken care of. 

Working a crisis hotline is hard work.  Being a cop is hard too.  For one moment in time, what the cop did in the wee hours of this morning and what we do on the phones every day was identical.  I thank god that Officer Dorsey used his ability to connect and build rapport with a fellow human in pain, to save this man's life.