This would be helpful outside of Mastodon, but...

We could really use some *basic simple to follow* suicide intervention 101 for social media. Especially for instance admins.

I'm not great at it. Most people aren't. But crises happen. And on Mastodon you sometimes haven't a clue where someone is and where to point them for help.

Would be great to have a sort of, IDK, panic button.

(This idea is clearly half-baked at best; it's kind of an "I wish I had this *right now* thing. ∑:c)

@Qwyrdo Even just a link to some existing training video or something…

@benhamill @Qwyrdo actually, yeah, does anyone know if there are suicide hotlines (especially chat suicide hotlines) that make their training materials public?

@nightpool @benhamill @Qwyrdo I don't believe there are. I can try to flip through some books this evening and see if there are any chapters that might be relevant to folks. (Though a lot of my reading materials are more distanced and academic.)

@nightpool @Qwyrdo @benhamill Okay, so. This is in more or less order from "hey, I want to read a whole book on this" to "but what do I need in the next half hour?". I'll disclaim that I haven't actually fully read any of these anything near recently, but I did flip through them today. More should probably be said on each, but, well, I have a limited number of characters. Obviously some of these things will be wrong in any given case, and it's important to be flexible.

@nightpool @benhamill @Qwyrdo So the whole-book textbook I've seen on this is "Crisis Assessment, Intervention, and Prevention" (Erford, now published as Merrill Counseling in the 3rd edition). I haven't read that edition, but the earlier ones seemed decent, if extensive. ISBN 0134522710 on the 3/e, doesn't appear available in the usual places for free ebooks, but there are somewhat cheap options. Wouldn't really recommend it unless you're really interested, though.

@nightpool @Qwyrdo @benhamill The "I just want a chapter or so of an academic book" option I'd go for is a chapter out of "Clinical Mental Health Counseling in Community and Agency Settings" (Newsome, also under Merrill Counseling in 4/e). Relevant chapter is 9 in 4/e, 8 in 3/e. Chapters 12+13 in 4/e (11+10 in 3/e) also cover other useful things, and if you've got the 3rd edition, read the epilogue ("Managing Stress and Avoiding Burnout"). Decent if you can find a copy.

@nightpool @benhamill @Qwyrdo The "what do I hand to someone who asks?" option is probably the WHO's Psychological First Aid[1]. It's easy to understand, covers the most important parts (although without as much background), and freely available. Focuses a bit on disaster scenarios, but the meat of it applies pretty universally. If you're pressed for time, chapters 3 + 4 are the most relevant, but the others are important too.

1: http://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/guide_field_workers/en/ , PDFs in 23 langs.