Listing Suicide Hotlines on Your Site

Keeping the list of Suicide Hotlines on your site is a problem.

Here's Why & What To Do About It

Most webmasters don't know that the Hotlines need constant updating !
Hotline numbers frequently change or go obsolete.

Why ?
Loss of funding, organizational changes,
& area code changes.

What happens to the old phone numbers ?
They get reassigned !

The new number can belong to any kind of business, personal residence, fax number, modem, who knows !!

Suicidal callers can get

  • out of service numbers,

  • someone's home number

  • or even a sex hotline !

This has happened to lots of numbers.

Recently an organization lost their web site and a porn site went up in it's place !!

A number in Hawaii went to a casket store ! Yikes !

 

What's the solution ?
(besides just linking to the pages ?)

The Update Page.

If you link, then you don't have to worry about it.

But if you really want to keep the list on your site - Please be aware that it carries some extra work and responsibility.

If you copy and paste into your own pages, you will need to check the update page every month or so to see what updating has been done and you can copy and paste updated pages to your site.

Also, please, paste in the link to the hotline update form so that we can get any update messages from viewers.  Or, please, use this link to forward any update messages you get.  These messages are very important for the updating process.

There might be an email update notification list developed at some point.  Feel free to send your site address and email.

Should you try to "update" the numbers on your own ?
Please don't :) Here's Why Not:

  1. The busy crisis centers shouldn't be inundated with updating calls from every hotline listing web site on the net. Remember, they are busy taking calls from the suicidal viewers we all want to help.
  2. It's a daunting task that takes many months.  It's so much work that no one has the time to complete the entire list and everyone's hotline list is out of date, including SuicideHotlines.net, SuicideHotlines.com, Hopeline & AAS.
  3. We are trying to find a way to work together and to set some standards as to the kind of services we want to list
If you want to volunteer, please use this link.

 

Please Note That AAS - the American Association of Suicidology
is no longer displaying their list of Crisis Centers,
for those who may wish to update their links.

 

 

10/17/05