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Suicide Prevention Center Needs Korean-Speaking Volunteers

March 18, 2014
From top to bottom, left to right: Sandra Yi, Dr. Thomas Han, Lim Jung-hyun, Lyn Morris, Robert Stohr, Didi Hirsch President Kita S. Curry, Cathy Jung. (Lee Woo-su)

From top to bottom, left to right: Sandra Yi, Dr. Thomas Han, Lim Jung-hyun, Lyn Morris, Robert Stohr, Didi Hirsch President Kita S. Curry, Cathy Jung. (Lee Woo-su)

By The Korea Times Los Angeles staff

The Suicide Prevention Center at Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services is looking for crisis line volunteers.

The 24/7 line receives more than 50,000 calls each year from the Los Angeles area, among them from Korean American callers who don’t speak English. The center hopes to attract more volunteers, including bilingual speakers, from diverse backgrounds.

Training for the volunteer program runs eight Saturdays for eight hours a day and is open to anyone who is interested in lending a hand, said Robert Stohr, director of the center.

Suicide took the lives of about 38,000 Americans in 2010. In Los Angeles alone, 784 died as a result of suicide in 2013, while attempts at suicide came in at 20 times that of deaths, said Kita S. Curry, president of Didi Hirsch.

According to Curry, Korean Americans suffer from the fifth-highest suicide rate among ethnicities in L.A. The center currently employs five Korean-speaking counselors and no Korean-speaking volunteers.

Dr. Thomas Han, a board member of Didi Hirsch, said that Koreans may hesitate to call crisis lines because it may be looked upon as a culturally shameful act, but that the calls will always remain anonymous and the caller’s identity protected.

“Stigma is a big issue,” Han said. “If we could somehow educate the community and get rid of the stigma, that it’s OK to talk about these things, I think we could prevent a lot of problems that come because of mental illness.”

Didi Hirsch, which has been around for 70 years, operates 11 centers in L.A. and Orange County.

It focuses on prevention education to spread the message that suicide is out there but that it is preventable, Stohr said.

In addition to its crisis line, the center offers outreach training for police, schools, family mental health clinics and churches, as well as a suicide response team of volunteers who are sent to counsel families on-site in cases of emergency.

The center also offers an online chat service that operates from 8:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. every day. The center hopes to expand the chat to a 24/7 service by the end of the year as it brings more volunteers on board.

“It really takes a whole community to help prevent suicide,” Curry said.

Reach the suicide prevention crisis line at 1-877-727-4747 or the national prevention line at 1-800-273-8255. For more information on becoming a volunteer, call 310-895-2304 or visit didihirsch.org.