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I wouldn’t recommend this. First of all, you shouldn’t provide personal opinions such as “terrible”. Then, asking what they are going to do forces them to confront the problem which they may not be ready to do yet, or may not want to articulate to you.


Usually in the sort of situation where you'd say this, you're just reflecting the speaker's very-clearly-expressed emotional state back at them to demonstrate that you're actively engaged in listening and considering their statements.

It's not something you'd say in response to a text complaint, where there's not enough "bandwidth" to clearly communicate the complainant's emotional state; but it's something CSRs are trained to say on phone calls all the time.

It's also the reason that therapists vastly prefer speaking in person, to video calls, to phone calls; and almost never even consider doing "therapy via text chat." There's not enough bandwidth in text chat to enable a therapist to properly engage with and respond to the emotional content of a client's communication; but with each additional level (voice, video, in-person meeting), that's more possible.

(Interesting consideration, given that: suicide/crisis hotlines should probably consider offering video calls as an option, as the increased bandwidth for emotional content will allow the operator to engage with + potentially help the caller on a deeper level.)


I’m sort of inclined to think that people calling suicide hotlines are probably not that enthusiastic to hop on a video call.

Just reaching out is hard, and you want to be as anonymous as possible.




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