An Exploration of National Calls to Lifeline Australia: Social Support or Urgent Suicide Intervention?

Lifeline Australia Inc. provides a free 24-hour telephone counselling and referral service to all Australians. The trained telephone counsellors of the service record information on many of their calls in Lifeline's Client Service Management Information System (CSMIS). This paper presents a descriptive summary of a national CSMIS data set, which was compiled during a 3-month period in 2003. The CSMIS data provided a clear national profile of the callers to the service. The results of this study support the hypothesis that callers are generally seeking social support from the service. The discussion explores the implications of this finding for Lifeline and other generalist counselling and referral services and their capacity to offer suicide intervention to the community.