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> But asking permission is not really an option, and I'll explain why using a different situation. We were also mandatory reporters, which meant that if we knew

> But asking permission is not really an option, and I'll explain why using a different situation. We were also mandatory reporters, which meant that if we knew that a child was being abused, we had to report it to the authorities. This was actually a very high bar to climb, but once we knew it, we had a duty to report. It was a threshold after which it wasn't our decision. I appreciate your response, from what I gathered it seems like your justification for not asking permission is "well that's not up to me, its higher in the chain". Which I understand, I'm not criticizing /you/ in particular, I understand you are a mandated reporter, I'm critizing the policy itself. I'm saying people who call suicide hotlines should be informed they are talking to a mandated reporter at the beginning of the call.

emacsen 3y ago
I agree entirely. There were many things that upset me about our system/process. We were a messaging based service (not voice) and we were trained to not lie, but not be entirely forthcoming with folks either. For example, if they asked about privacy, we would skirt around the situation or point them to legal documents rather than be honest. Another example is that on rare occasion, a person might be talking to a person and they had to leave. In those situations, one of us might continue to talk to them as if we were the other person. I always felt creepy doing this. Our service was very focused on making everything very procedural and standardized, but in doing so, I felt like we were simply serving up fast-food help- consistent but lacking in depth as well. I can see both sides of all of this... there were so many people that needed help and not enough volunteers, so standardizing helps. At the same time, I bet that today a ChatGPT service could do basically what we did (and I know they collected our chats and did analytics on them, so I bet that's what they're thinking too).

emacsen 3y ago

I agree entirely. There were many things that upset me about our system/process. We were a messaging based service (not voice) and we were trained to not lie, but not be entirely forthcoming with folks either. For example, if they asked about privacy, we would skirt around the situation or point them to legal documents rather than be honest. Another example is that on rare occasion, a person might be talking to a person and they had to leave. In those situations, one of us might continue to talk to them as if we were the other person. I always felt creepy doing this. Our service was very focused on making everything very procedural and standardized, but in doing so, I felt like we were simply serving up fast-food help- consistent but lacking in depth as well. I can see both sides of all of this... there were so many people that needed help and not enough volunteers, so standardizing helps. At the same time, I bet that today a ChatGPT service could do basically what we did (and I know they collected our chats and did analytics on them, so I bet that's what they're thinking too).