Editor’s note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
Active-duty service members and veterans thinking of harming themselves can get free crisis care. Contact the Military Crisis Line at 988, then press 1, or access online chat by texting 838255. People who are not in the military can also call 988.
I started calmly. Politely, even. The first recording asked me to select from a list of options. I listened to all of them. Pressed the numbers that seemed closest to what I needed.
Thank you. Please hold while we transfer your call.
Vivaldi played for a few minutes.
The next recording asked me to describe my reason for calling. I kept it brief, like it asked me to. “I’m having thoughts of suicide and need to schedule an appointment.”
Thank you. For substance abuse, press 1. For mental health services, press 2. For—
I pressed 2.
Thank you. Please hold while we connect you to the next available representative.
More elevator music. Then a new voice, recorded but cheerful, asked me to verify my insurance information. I recited it from memory. And once more, when an actual person finally answered. She said she’d need to transfer me to scheduling.
Eight minutes of waiting later, another recording asked me to select from the following options.
“Representative,” I said, louder than necessary.
I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please select from—
“Mental health appointment.”
I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please select from the following…
The recording gave me the same options I’d already heard twice, then repeated itself because I couldn’t unlock the phone fast enough with facial recognition to press anything. It transferred me to a voicemail box.
This mailbox is full and cannot accept messages at this time.
The line went dead.
I pulled over. My hands tightened on the steering wheel. I’d been on the phone for 35 minutes with the local mental health clinic where I had previously been a patient and had spoken to exactly one human being, who’d transferred me to a recording. No help yet.
I called another number for a random place I found on Google. More menus, more transfers, and another clerk’s recording telling me the clinic no longer took walk-ins. Would I like the scheduling number?
“Representative!” I yelled.
I’m sorry, I didn’t understand—
“Then fucking listen!”
The system transferred me. The phone rang four times.
This mailbox is full and cannot—
I hung up.
Forty-seven minutes. I’d yelled at a machine, and the only person who’d heard me was my mother, because I finally gave up and called her.
I could tell I worried her. I curse, but not like that. Not so much, not so fast. The words came out in a rush. I loudly explained what I’d been trying to do, what kept happening, how nobody would listen to me and then I stopped myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be making this your problem.”
She said something kind. She told me she wanted to help, but all I could hear was the helplessness in her voice.
I told her I’d figure it out. I hung up. I tried a new number.
I called Tricare this time, my insurance. They were helpful in the way that organizations are when they want to appear helpful without actually helping. A recording thanked me for my service and asked me to hold.
A person eventually answered. I explained, as calmly as I could, what I needed.
She gave me a list of providers “in network.” Forty phone numbers. Maybe one of them would answer.
The first three went to voicemail. The seventh connected me to an automated system.
More music.
When someone finally answered, they told me the earliest available appointment was in six weeks. I could be placed on a cancellation list. Would I like that?
“Sure,” I said.
“Great,” the voice said. “You should receive a call tomorrow to confirm.”
“What do you mean a call tomorrow—”
The call ended.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot where I’d pulled over to make these calls. My phone battery was at 8%. Ninety minutes gone.
I had screamed at five automated systems, apologized to my mother, given my credit card information to a machine, and been promised a call tomorrow.
But tomorrow felt very far away.
I picked up my phone again, with more desperation than before. I dialed 988, the suicide hotline, the first time I had ever done so. I hadn’t needed it an hour ago, but this — the system designed to help me and others like me — made me feel worthless.
A real person answered. She was sweet. She talked me down. Told me all the things you say to someone who is on the verge of formalizing his suicide note. I was one of the lucky ones. Thousands of calls have gone unanswered.
It was only a few weeks before that I had walked into an inpatient mental health clinic, separate from the regular clinics I had fruitlessly tried calling.
It was 5:30 p.m. on a Friday. The sunset was beautiful from the waiting room chair. Orange and pink bleeding across the sky through windows that didn’t open. Maybe they weren’t even glass. I watched it fade while I filled out forms. Rate your depression on a scale of 1 to 10. Have you experienced a loss of interest in activities? Changes in appetite? Thoughts of death?
Yes or no. Check the box.
With the paperwork done, I waited several hours. Sitting. Pacing. Sitting again. Staring at people who I thought belonged there more than I did. Long enough to watch the sky go from orange to purple to black. Long enough to see others come and go. Long enough to wonder if anyone had noticed I wasn’t home.
When it was finally my turn, a nurse took my vitals without making eye contact. Blood pressure, weight, temperature. The machine beeped. She wrote something down. In another room with no windows, I waited two more hours before a doctor appeared in the doorway, clipboard in hand.
“So, you’re depressed?” she said. “Why?”
I looked at her. She was looking at the tablet. I understood, at that moment, eye contact was out of the question.
Her casualness, leaning against the door frame, suggested I wasn’t her first depressed patient today. And that perhaps she and the prior ones had not been on good terms.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It was the least resentful answer I could give. It was also true, in the way that true things are often insufficient when you’re trying to explain why you don’t want to be alive anymore.
She shook her head. Told me to put my clothes in a bag.
The gown they gave me was made of paper. Two pieces, thin as the material a dentist uses to catch blood before it hits your clothes. This seemed fitting. I was told not to open doors myself, that I would be escorted. Corners and sharp edges were dangerous. I was being protected from furniture.
There were several rooms. I was ushered to the dining hall. Nothing more than a feeding station, utilitarian and bare. It was designed for moving things through — not people but things. It made me want to smash my head into the walls, but somehow I resisted.
I noticed a dozen or so other people dressed like me. Some were talking, some were laughing. They’d formed a kind of community in this place, a society of the fenced-off. They didn’t seem to notice we were being treated like livestock. Corralled and isolated. Safe from ourselves. Dehumanized for the sake of survival. Apparently, they’d locked our dignity in a separate room.
I hated it. I hated that I was here, in a place like this. It was as if they’d finally shown me who I deserved to be. I felt my stomach turn. Because the thing you need most when you’re trying not to kill yourself — connection, compassion, someone who sees you as more than a liability — is the first thing that gets processed out in these places. Not maliciously. Not even deliberately. It just happens. Checkbox by checkbox. Door by door. Doctor by doctor.
Press 1 if you’re experiencing thoughts of suicide. Press 2 if you’re depressed.
But there’s no button for “I need someone to care that I exist.” No option for “I feel like a burden, and you’re treating me exactly like one.” No form that captures what it’s like to sit in a paper gown under fluorescent lights, forbidden from opening doors, while someone with a clipboard decides whether you’re stable enough to return to the place that made you feel unstable to begin with.
The system is callous. It’s cold. It’s designed to manage risk, process people, and keep you alive long enough to discharge you with a safety plan and a list of outpatient referrals.
What it isn’t designed to do is give you a reason to want tomorrow to come.
Evan Slusser is a former Marine Corps pilot and current doctoral student in political geography. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Virginia Tech and the University of Arizona, as well as time attending the Marine Corps University. After a decade of service, he now resides in North Carolina and spends his free time gardening and birdwatching. Neither at which he is remotely successful.
This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
This article first appeared on The War Horse and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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