Not many people realize that suicide is the third leading cause of death amoung young adults between 15 and 24 and the fourth leading cause among those 25 to 44. Or that twice as many people are killed by suicide as homicide. Or that over 90,000 people a year are hospitilized for suicide attempts and up to 325,000 are treated in ER's each year.
One of my favorite former Senators (Welstone) sponsored a bill before he died to increase funding to the private non-profit crisis clinics and the Kristin Brooks Hope Center http://www.hopeline.com/ that runs The National Suicide Hotline and built a model NGO that that links over 2,000 people a day to a network of local crisis centers and is about to be replaced by a federal one.
Since the details are in dispute and perhaps they just didn't get their bills submitted on time http://www.save1800suicide.org/ Why should you care? Well all 800 numbers track callers numbers of course. (more below)
For those of you who like conspiracy theories - 1) The US government is also asking 1-800-Suicide to give them their call detail list from ATT since last January
http://www.save1800suicide.org/... in order to transfer the number over to the new contractor.
2) They also oddly enough issued a press release http://www.save1800suicide.org/... on August 2nd alerting all of the crisis clinics in the country to switch over to their 1-800-talk number by August 12th even though the shut down notice from the phone company hadn't been received yet. How did they know the date ahead of time?
This all could simply be a case of a small non-profit that didn't have a good admin or didn't raise enough money to cover their costs. Then again, would you want your phone number on a CD that the government has if you were in a crisis? Perhaps they won't ever use it but then again in times of a crisis we all lose our liberties.
There is a petition to keep the numbers private that you might want to sign. http://www.save1800suicide.org/...