Profiles

Saving the lives on the line

By Cheng Yingqi (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-03 07:49

Wang Cuiling, 42, head of China's first 24-hour suicide prevention hotline under the Beijing Huilongguan Hospital. [Guan Xin / China Daily]

BEIJING - At 4 am one spring day, Wang Cuiling was sitting alone in her workroom, dozing away her 16-hour shift.

But she was shaken out of her stupor when the phone rang and a weak, low voice spoke to her.

"I just cut my wrist. The wound is deep and blood is all over the floor "

Wang felt herself shivering all over from the call.

That was seven years ago. Wang is now the head of a suicide prevention hotline. But she still remembers the fear from her first phone conversation with someone who wanted to commit suicide.

"Operating a suicide prevention hotline is challenging, but that is the very reason I love it," Wang said.

"The challenges urge me to grow more as a person," she said.

Wang, 42, used to be a nurse at the Beijing Huilongguan Hospital, one of the three largest psychiatric hospitals in the country. She became an operator when the suicide hotline was started eight years ago.

At the end of 2002, the Beijing Huilongguan Hospital opened China's first 24-hour suicide prevention hotline. By last April, it had received 530,000 incoming calls, answered 130,000 and saved more than 5,000 callers who tried to kill themselves. The number, 800-810-1117, was known as "the lifeline".

However, when Wang started her career at the hotline, she barely had any idea about the psychology behind her work.

"The training and back-up system was not complete at the beginning. I started to take the phones only after three days of training," she said.

"Luckily, there were no high-risk cases," Wang said.

High-risk callers refer to those who have "feasible plans" to kill themselves and make up 5 percent of total calls, Wang said.

Among the 34 to 40 phone calls the hotline receives every 24 hours, 80 percent are just calling to express their resentment over issues and pour out their troubles.

After a few months working on the line, Wang initially became sick of the callers' pessimism and sorrow.

"All the callers said their lives were messed up, but I felt it was not my fault," she said.

Wang used to be, in her own words, a "self-willed" person. She soon became impatient with the callers' problems.

"I tried to hide my feelings. But once you mix your own feelings with the callers', you won't be able to focus on their problems in an objective manner," she said.

To do her job better, Wang attended psychotherapy classes and earned a postgraduate degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2004. As her knowledge on psychology accumulated, Wang gradually understood the bitterness of the callers.

"They wouldn't have called if they were not suffering," Wang said.

"And they are not deliberately taking the anger out on me."

One day in 2004, a middle-aged woman called the hotline. For half an hour, she shouted wildly to the operator who tried every means to calm her down.

Hearing the screams on the phone, Wang took over from the operator.

"I lowered my voice and spoke to the phone in a deep tone," Wang said. "Because I knew that persuading wouldn't work in that situation. All she needed was a listener."

The woman was still shouting. "There is simply no justice in society. My neighbors discriminate me and all my colleagues want to mess me up," the caller had said.

Then, all of a sudden, she seemed to calm down and asked: "Wait a minute, the voice is different, did you change operators?"

"Yes," Wang said.

In the following 20 minutes, she succeeded in talking the woman out of her problems.

While such psychology works well on people's venting out their various emotions in such ways, suicide is quite another matter.

"It is about a life. It comes within an inch of death. And my job is to pull it back," Wang said.

Wang got her first call from an attempted suicide case that spring night in 2003 when she was struck with fear after the woman said she had cut her wrist.

"For about two or three minutes, I could hear myself talking to her in a disordered way, but I cannot remember what I said," Wang said.

After talking for a while, Wang recovered from the initial panic. She asked the caller about the depth of her wound, the amount of bleeding and the reason for her attempted suicide. The caller said she was undergoing an unhappy marriage that included a child in school.

After a 20-minute conversation, Wang persuaded the woman to dress the wound with a bandage. The woman was back in normal condition when hotline staff called her back the next day.

But some were not so lucky. In 2004, a woman called and said she had written her last words and would kill herself "straight away".

"She was so different. She talked suicide in a calm but determined voice and refused to give any details," Wang said.

"I could feel that she was raging inside, but her voice calm. So I sensed her determination to die."

Learning that the woman had problems with her husband, Wang persuaded her to release her husband's number. But when Wang finally contacted the husband, she was told the woman had died.

"My heart chilled when I heard that," Wang said.

In the following two or three months, Wang could not stop feeling guilty about it. "Did I do anything wrong? Did I say something that caused her death?" she kept asking herself.

Wang said she has to thank Zhang Yanping, deputy director of the hotline center at that time, for pulling through that period.

Zhang took out the record of the call and listened to it again and again with Wang. Zhang told Wang that she had done everything she could to help the woman. But the most important thing, as Zhang said, was that "the hotline is only a phone line, it cannot solve people's problems in real life. And the choice is always in the callers' hands."

Wang, now a tutor herself, frequently tells her students about these cases.

There is someone else Wang said she is thankful to - her husband Qi.

"He is my psychiatrist," Wang said. "Without his support, I could not have worked at full strength."

Since Wang worked on the hotline in 2002, she has taken night shifts constantly and goes home late. Qi took up the responsibility of taking care of their child and cooking their meals.

"I can't say that I like doing this," Qi said. "But I want Wang to do the things she likes."

As the years go by, Wang hears more stories on the phone and she feels luckier than ever to have a happy marriage.

"I used to be self-centered and I would snap at my husband whenever I was upset," Wang said.

"Then I tried to think from another perspective and took another look at what Qi had done for me," Wang said.

"Personal growth and evolution" are the best gifts from her job, Wang said.