Brian Finkelstein (3:07)
So the standard commitment to work at the Humanitarian Suicide Hotline is six months. Most people work six months and then they leave quickly. Some people volunteer, like a few make it a year. Nobody really goes beyond a year. I was a volunteer there for four years. It started when I was 22 years old and I was young and I believed in things because I was 22 and I thought maybe I could help the world. I wanted to help people because I was young enough to believe I could or that if I could, that I would want to. I was that age. And so I decided I was going to be a psychiatrist, a psychologist. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. But the problem was I was a 22 year old freshman at Queens College, which if you know Queens, it's not a great college. It's in Flushing, New York. It's not a nice place. And my GPA was a 2.0, 2.0, so. And I was 22, so I was going to have some problems getting into a master's program, which is very competitive for clinical psychology. So I decided I needed some work credit, internships, something to help me out, some leverage. So I decided to volunteer at the Humanitarian Suicide Hotline. So I show up one Saturday, Sunday morning or Saturday at 8am and I walk into this church on the Upper west side in Manhattan. And I walk inside and there's a bunch of people milling about. But I see this guy that's clearly the guy in charge. He's sitting on the desk. He's sort of like an ex hippie turned a little corporate. He's got like a flannel shirt tucked into khaki pants, you know what I mean? He's dipping a chamomile tea bag into an NPR cup. I know who this guy is. I get it. He's a vegan who drives a BMW. I know it. So clearly he's in charge. He tells us his name is Glenn. He's like, hey, check it out, all right, My name's Glenn. And then he thanks us all for coming and says, hey, even though we're in A church. You know, I just want you to know we're not affiliated with any sort of religion or God. So if you're here for that, let me just say straight out, if you're here for God or, or any sort of politics or religion, you should leave now. And right then, like some old dude in the back just goes, see ya. And walks out the door. And then he sits down. And even though he's got this like corporate Jewish, metrosexual hippie thing going on, he's also got a little bit of a Louis Scossett Jr drill sergeant thing going on. Because as soon as he starts a training class, he's starting to weed people out. People start dropping. There was this one guy who was sitting in the back of the class and was drinking a 40 of beer. The class, I should say, was at 8am Again, just to point that out. So he was gone. There were these two teenage dudes from Queens who every time they talked they were like, hey, douchebag. And then they'd high five, they were gone. There was a woman who did a mock phone call with Glenn because in the two week training class he did mock phone calls where he pretended to be callers. And Glenn was pretending to be this 70 year old dude who was HIV positive and had just found out he had AIDS and was very upset. And he was talking to this woman, Nancy, and Nancy was doing the phone call and she goes, well, I just want you to know that's very upsetting. I'm very sorry for you, but you did choose this lifestyle. So gone. Now, one of the most important things Glenn weeded out, he said, was people who were there because they were either suicide survivors, meaning people whose family members, they've lost somebody because of suicide, or because they themselves, the volunteer had contemplated or tried to commit suicide. And as Glenn would say, yeah, check it out, you're really not a good fit. Gone. And so they would leave at the end of two weeks of training. Out of 58 people who came to volunteer, there was only four of us left because Glenn was really good. But I will tell you right now, I was better. Because what Glenn didn't know about me was that about four years before this, I lived in San Diego, California. And I bet you Glenn never knew that. When I lived in San Diego, I was dating this girl Tracy, and Tracy was addicted to meth and I was addicted to Tracy. So Tracy would try to do the meth, I would try to do her. Neither one of us would ever be satisfied. That's addiction. So one Day, Tracy slept with my best friend, Baby Face, the guy who looked like Morrissey. That's probably why she slept with him, because she was into that. She slept with him and I had it. And I bet you Glenn didn't know that. I then jumped in my five speed, puke orange VW fastback and awesome car, and I drove up to my dad's house in Del Mar, California. I was living in San Diego, and I went into his garage and I took his.38 because my father's a retired cop. And I bet you Glenn has no idea that. 38s doesn't have one of those clips that you put in. It's got the thing, and you put the bullets in and you snap it, and it's really easy, even if you don't know how to use guns. And I grabbed a bottle of tequila out of my father's liquor cabinet, and I got in my car and I drove to Torrey Pines beach, and I took the gun, and I drank about a half a bottle of tequila. And I bet you Glenn has no idea that a gun like that is really easy, because if you pull the hammer back, it sort of like has a hairpin. Like, you can just tap it, and it's going to go off. And I took the gun and I stuck it in my mouth. And I'll bet you Glenn has no idea how good it feels to stick a loaded gun in your mouth. It feels incredibly good. I'm not. Look, I'm not a hanser. Things aren't going good for me. I'm just pointing it out, like, just saying it right now in front. It feels good to have control, to say, like, I'm gonna put a gun in my mouth, and I'm gonna have some control over something. And I sat there and I put the gun, and I was trying to contemplate doing it, and then tequila makes me a little dramatic. And I threw up. I'm not a good drinker. I want to be the guy that drinks a bottle of tequila, but it's not me. I'm not Bukowski. I'm Dr. Phil. And I threw up all over the gun. And there's nothing that sort of snaps you out of a suicide impulse than throwing up on a gun. It really just sort of clears your head. And I took the gun out, and I thought to myself, well, at least I know I'm not the type of person that's gonna pull the trigger, which I don't know. For me, it's something I had to find out that way. And it Also snapped me out of the suicide. And I felt really good. And I felt like this moment of clarity. And I wiped the throw up off me and I got out of my car and I went. I was in Torrey Pines, beautiful beach, and I went into the water. It was late at night, beautiful, full moon. And I went in the water and it was like, perfect. And I had what for me was a perfect life moment. I sat there under the full moon in the water, just feeling really good, the waves sort of washing over, and I realized that's what life is. That's enough for me because there's these moments of beauty, like moons and oceans, and then there's moments of horror, and then it's good again and then it's horrible and kicks you in the face, and then it's good again and then it's horrible and a pigsty, because that's what life is. But then for a moment, it's good. And for me, that's enough. But I bet you Glenn didn't know any of that because I never told him. So, at the end of two weeks of training class, out of a series of 58 people, four of us are left. Now we walk into the training room and there's the hotline room. And just to give you an idea what it looks like, there's three desks with phones. There's a couple plants, and there's a couple things that hang on the walls. There's a list of phone numbers. There's Glenn's home number, in case you need them. There's Poison control. And then there's 911, in case you forget what 911 the number for. Shouldn't have to write that down. And then there's a sign that hangs on the wall that says the motto of the hotline, which is Shut up and listen. Big block letters, Shut up and listen. And that is an amazing expression to me. That is exactly why I stayed there for four years. Because after six months I got my certificate, I was free to leave, but I ended up staying for four years because of that thing. Because it made me feel good to work there for two reasons. One, listening to people's problems on the phone, you start to feel to yourself, you know what? I don't have it so bad. These people have it a lot worse. To me, it's like if you go to the park and you sit on a bench and you look down and you see a squirrel and you say, well, at least I'm not a squirrel. You know what I mean? It's something. And two, seeing the sign. Shut up and listen. It's how you do prevent suicides. It's what you do is by listening to people. We can't. We don't listen to each other. We have agendas. It makes sense. Whether it's somebody you love or relationship or people you don't like or just casual. We all have agendas. We all trying to get something. And we like to talk. I clearly like to talk a lot about myself. I'm up here. But the idea of sitting and listening to somebody else talk made me feel good. And it made me feel like I was helping. And that's why I stayed for four years. Now, the way the training basically says that what you do is you answer the call, you say, humanitarian suicide hotline. Thanks for calling you. Then listen to somebody. Be an active listener. You have to be an active listener. Glenn said not to get scared of silence if there was silence on the phone. Because check it out, silence is a form of communication. Right on. He also said that you can't get manipulated by silence. So if it lasts five minutes, you gotta hang up the phone. Don't get manipulated at the end of 12 minutes, end the call then, because that's about the allotted time. And before you entered the call, you had to evaluate the person's level of suicide. And the way you do that is you ask a series of four questions. One, do you feel so bad that you think about suicide? Two, do you have a plan for how you would do it? Three, have you set a time for when you're going to do that? And four, have you taken any steps today to kill yourself? Now, in the four years I worked there, 99.9% of all calls are yes, no, no, no. A lot of people think about suicide, but a lot of people don't really go the next step. And what he said is the only thing that he would offer as a bit of advice was the biggest, clearest thing. A warning sign. The closest thing to a warning sign that you can have for suicide is if somebody says something like, I don't want to die. I just want the pain to stop. And if you hear somebody say that, that they want the pain to stop, that is about a bell should go off. That's a person who's on the edge. So four years later, I'm working at the hotline. I come in for the overnight shift. I walk in there. It's me and my shift partner, a guy named Adam. Adam's a communist. Not relevant at all to the story. Just a Little detail. You're welcome. So me and Adam are working the overnight shift. And it's busy till about. The overnight shift's 11 to 8, 11 at night to 8 o'clock in the morning. You have to do one a year or one a month. And it's busy till like 4am till the bars close in New York. And then it sort of slows down and it gets slow. And around 4 o'clock it was, you know, Adam, it was my turn to answer the phone. And the phone rings and I pick it up and I say, hello, humanitarians, can I help you? And this very young, cute, scared voice comes on the phone and says, hi, my name's Amy. I'd like to talk. And I said, what's up, Amy? What's going on? She says, oh, nothing. I was just, you know, calling because I was feeling a little sad and I was like, oh, what are you sad about? She goes, ah, I don't know. Things are pretty good. You know, I have good grades at school and my parents don't get it, but they love me. And, you know, I have a good friend back in Tennessee where I'm from. And, you know, NYU's good. I have good friends here. I have friends who are. She said she had two types of friends, which I thought was really funny, and I use it all the time, is that she had bar friends and. And then she had movie friends. I like that expression. I wish I had some movie friends, but so be it. And right away, I pictured her the way you do when you talk to somebody on the phone. I pictured her in her dorm room and I pictured like a quilt. And I pictured her with like, long hair sitting on her bed and like rollerblades and like a Dr. Pepper, you know what I mean? I got her figured out. And so I said, well, that sounds good, but you said you were sad. What do you think about when that happens? She goes, I don't know. She goes, I can't. I don't understand what happens. I can't control it. She goes, sometimes when I have a great day, what I do the next day is I try to duplicate it. I wake up at the same time. I try to eat the same food, try to have the same pattern so that I can control the day, so that I don't feel bad. But then out of nowhere, she said she feels what she described as a hand coming from behind her and sort of pushing her down. I said, okay, well, what's going on when that happens? What are you thinking about? And she goes, ah, Everything. Nothing. I don't know. This feels so stupid. She started to feel uncomfortable and then we sort of started to. We started to flirt. Like, not in an inappropriate way, but there was like a. There was a look. A lot of the callers I talked to over the years were crazy. This was. She could have been a movie friend if I had met her, some other situation. So it wasn't inappropriate. But I was talking to her and we talked for a little while and then she said she felt dumb because of depression. She felt like, yeah, she felt this sadness. She felt this crippling sadness, but she thought that depression was overused as an expression and that there are people who are clinically or socially or chemically or whatever depressed. But she thought maybe she was just. A lot of people are lazy or overuse that word or use it as an excuse. And she was worried she might be like that. And I can identify. I feel the same way. I feel that way, you know, like, I don't think I get depressed. I mean, sure, there's days where I don't get out of bed for four days, but I'm not depressed, right? So we were talking like that, and then I noticed that it was about, like time to wrap it up. And I was about to wrap it up and Amy starts to tell me. She was telling me the story about going to some place with her family one day and they went out to get ice cream and her father bought her ice cream and it was a great day. And I said, oh, that's great. And I looked at the clock and I was about to wrap it up, but then I noticed what started to happen was Amy started to slur her speech a little bit. And I said, amy, what's going on? Are you okay? And she goes, yeah. She goes, look, I know it's selfish and I know it's stupid, but I can't do it anymore. I just want it to stop. And I said, what do you mean? What do you mean by it? She goes, I don't know. I just, I can't. I just want you to talk to me. I was like, well, when you said it, what did you mean? She goes, look, I don't want to die. I just want the pain to stop. And I woke up and I said, amy, do you feel so bad that you think about suicide? And she said, yes. And I said, do you have a plan for how you would do it? Yes. Have you set a time for when you're going to do it? Uh huh. Amy, have you taken any steps today to Kill yourself? And she said, yes. And I said, amy, what have you done? And she told me she took 20 high strength painkillers. And I said, what kind of painkillers? Because that's what you're supposed to do. And she told me, and I wrote it down. And I threw a pencil at him, who was nodding off because he's a communist. And I handed him. I handed him the piece of paper so he could call Poison Control, so I could have some information about what would happen so I could pass it on to her. And I said, I just tried to keep Amy talk. And I was like, trying to ask her about, like, other things. And she was again talking about that day her father bought her ice cream. And it was very confusing. And then Adam came back with a piece of paper he had called Poison Control. And I said, amy, given the fact that you took 20 high strength painkillers, are you. And that you drank and that you haven't thrown up, which she had told me, do you understand that you could pro. You probably. You could die within an hour. And she started to cry. And I said, amy, look, do you want help? Do you want me to do something? I can do something. I can only help you if you ask. Our policy was not to let. Not to intervene unless people want it. I said, if you want help, I can do something. She goes, I do. I don't want. This is. No, I don't want to do this. I said, great. What's your address? She gave me her address. I handed it to Adam. He went to go call 911 because the number was on the board. And I kept Amy talking. And after a while, I just tried to ask her anything. And I was like, amy, what kind of ice cream was it that your father bought? You mentioned that your father bought you ice cream. What kind of ice cream was it? But it was silent. And it was silent for two minutes, and it was silent for five minutes. And I'm supposed to hang up the phone, but who the hell could hang up the phone? So I didn't. And then it was seven minutes, and around 13, 14 minutes, I heard noises at the door because Adam had called 911. And I heard, like, people knocking. And then I heard the door crash open. I heard footsteps. And then I heard this voice come on the phone and said it, okay, we've got her. Click. And then I went home. And I was supposed to go to class that day. I had classes at Queens College, but I didn't go back to Queens College. I never went back to Queens College. I never graduated. I was supposed to go back to the hotline for a debriefing based on that phone call. I called Glenn and told him I quit, that I wasn't coming back. But check it out. Click. And then I did all the things you're not supposed to do in that situation. I obsessed about it and I stayed up and I drank and I smoked and I drank coffee and I searched. It wasn't the Internet, but I looked through the papers and listened to the radio. And finally, after three days of it, I found on the Daily News, in the Daily News in New York, page 23, a small paragraph that said that they had found the body of a 23 year old NYU student named Amy Walters who died of an accidental overdose. And I know why they call it accidental. I get it. There's insurance reasons, religious reasons, family. They don't want an epidemic to start in a college. I get all that. But what I didn't know was that I was, until that moment, that I was the last person to talk to her. Not her mom in Tennessee or her best friend or some boy at nyu probably had a crush on her that never talked to her and probably note me. And I wanted to call her family and I wanted to try to go down to the funeral, but I knew it was inappropriate and so I didn't. And the thing of it is, for me, I have had bigger personal tragedies over the years. I think we all have. People do. I spoke to her for less than an hour 20 years ago, but she's me in that car. And I think about it every day. If I had pulled that trigger, that would be me. And she never got to find out what I got to find out, which is, it's terrible sometimes, but there are these perfect life moments. And that's enough. Thank you.
