Amber Hollingsworth explains how to handle crisis situations where someone is threatening self-harm or harm to others. She distinguishes imminent danger (call 911 and request a mental-health-trained officer if possible) from non-imminent but serious concerns (contact the county mental health department to request a pickup/order and safety check). She emphasizes always taking suicide threats seriously—call for evaluation even if you suspect manipulation—both to avoid being wrong and to discourage future manipulation.
Chapters
Okay, let's talk about how to handle a serious emergency crisis safety issue. I hope this never happens to you, but in case it does, I want you to know what to say. For whatever reason, you get into a crisis situation, an emergency, so someone is threatening to hurt themselves, someone is threatening to hurt you. You can call the police. If it's imminent, that means it's happening right now. Like someone is standing in your living room. They have like a knife to their wrist, like they're threatening you, they're throwing things, whatever. It's like out of control right now, this moment. You can call the police and you can say, hey, I'm having an emergency situation. This is. You can even say, depending on how you want to handle it, you can say, this is a mental health situation. A lot of counties have mental health trained police officers. You can even ask, can you send a mental health trained police officer here? And then that person can come out and they can evaluate the person for safety. Then they, if they see the person is not safe, they may take the person to the hospital to be evaluated for further for safety, decide if they need to be committed to the hospital or something like that. But you can do that if they're not like standing in the middle of the living room, like right now. They're not imminently dangerous. They're not like telling you they're going to hurt themselves or acting out in some kind of really crazy way. But the situation is not good. Like, let's say your loved one is experiencing some sort of psychosis or something, like something really bad, like they're delusional and they haven't been home in two days and you know, they don't have their medicines and you don't know where they're at. You can call, usually you can call the mental health department in the county where you live. You can explain to them what's going on. You can say, I'm very worried about this person's safety. You can tell them the whole situation and you can ask them to put up a pickup order for them. So what they'll do is they'll call the police and they'll say, hey, be on the lookout for this person who looks like this, who might be at this place or whatever. They're unsafe, they're mentally unstable, they haven't been taking their meds. Like, they need a safety check. And then if they get found, then the same thing will happen. Like, they'll evaluate them. They may take them to the hospital to get evaluated. So that's something you can do in a crisis situation that's maybe not like immediately like right now you have to call the police. You can call the mental health department who can get you some help for that situation. In certain situations and these are like the seriously not good ones, people, adults and kids will get themselves in crisis and they'll threaten to kill themselves. Sometimes they really mean it. Now when someone is intoxicated, they may not have been suicidal at all, but someone's intoxicated and they're saying they're going to kill themselves, like take it seriously, that's a bad situation. A lot of times kids. But I'm telling you, I've seen adults do this too. They've just learned to say or threaten themselves to control the situation or to get what they want. Even if you think that's what's happening, I want you to do the very same thing you would do if you thought it was serious. I want you to say, oh my gosh, that's terrible, I'm so worried. And I want you to pick up the phone and want you to call for someone to come out and evaluate this person. You can call the non emergency police line or I guess if they're telling you they're kill themselves, just call 911 and say what's going on and say I need this person to evaluate. I'm very worried. It's my kids, my husband, whatever it is. And like they're not safe have this person evaluated. Even if you think they're just manipulating you, the reason is because number one, you could be wrong and you don't want to be wrong about this. You don't want to think whatever they say that all the time, like they don't mean it and they do, like not a chance you want to take. But secondly, even if they are using that to manipulate you, if you do the same thing every time they threaten that and you're very consistent about it, they're going to learn that doesn't work. That doesn't get me what I want. That gets an officer to come out here and talk to me and sometimes take me to the hospital and then I have to deal with that like it's not working. So if someone's threatening themselves, always take it serious because number one, it could be serious and number two, you want to train this person that that's not the way to try and manipulate or interact with you. Always take it serious. Call the police, ask them to come out and evaluate this.
