A Year to Prepare – Organizers Work to Ensure 988 Helps Rural Residents Too – The Daily Yonder
By Liz Carey
In July 2022, the federal government launched 988 – a hotline for people experiencing a mental health crisis to connect with professionals and services that can help them. At the outset, critics worried that the number wouldn’t help residents in communities, many in rural areas, that don’t have access to mental health services.
The new three-digit number will make it easier for people in rural communities to access crisis intervention, Jeff Winton, founder and chairman of Rural Minds, a Maryville, New York, non-profit dedicated to helping rural residents with their mental health issues, told the Daily Yonder.
“Mental illness and substance use disorder in rural areas have been growing exponentially even before Covid hit,” he said. “It’s not seen as an illness. It’s seen as a character flaw. It’s seen as something you should be able to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get over… And until such time that we get people to consider it an illness, we’re going to be hamstrung and this epidemic is going to continue to grow.”