Opinion: Every smartphone should have an app to connect to 988, the mental health crisis line
Far too few people know about 988, the new mental health emergency hotline. Smartphone manufacturers and cellular carriers can change that.
At the height of the pandemic, when everything was shut down, a patient with whom I had a long-term relationship developed suicidal ideation. A male adolescent who lived in poverty, he was not able to call me on his smartphone because he had run out of minutes. And he was ashamed to use his parents’ telephone because of privacy issues. Fortunately, he was able to find help.
I thought about him recently when my iPhone went into shutdown unexplainably for two consecutive Sundays at the same times and had to be erased each time. The good news was that I could still have used this bricked phone to call 911 in the event of an emergency. Any phone in the U.S. can be used to dial 911, regardless of whether it is currently registered with a cellular carrier.
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