Pam's House Blend
Terrance at The Republic of T. has a call to action on yet another program being unraveled by the Bush adminstration that affects many people at risk, including LGBT youth.
The 1-800-SUICIDE line is in trouble. The government has ceased its funding for this important resource and wants to roll services into one of its agencies.
With teenage suicide being the 3rd leading cause of death between 18 to 24 year olds - our government should not be duplicating prevention efforts but helping fund the many local organizations and non-profits with proven track records on prevention. In addition our government should not be in the business having access to this private and sensitive information!
Despite the fact that almost 2 million callers have reached help and hope over the last 8 years, and a government funded evaluation stating the benefits of 1-800-SUICIDE, the Substance Abuse & Mental Health Service Administration (SAMHSA), a division of Health & Human Services, has decided to create their own government run system where they would have direct access to confidential data on individuals in crisis.
You might recall SAMHSA, which came under fire from the fundies back in February of last year. Agency officials were forced by the Bush admin (after the WH received hopping mad calls from Family Research Council's Tony Perkins) to remove all LGBT references from a federally funded suicide prevention conference in California and to kill gay-positive content from the SAMHSA site.
The Bushies also suggested a session on "faith-based" suicide prevention, and threatened the conference's funding. The wingnut admin functionaries backed down after an outcry for sanity from response from mental health professionals.
SAMHSA also took a big hit when its web site featured a section called "Celebrating the Pride and Diversity Among and Within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Populations" which flew in the face of the flat-earth science often promoted in government under Bush that seems to either ignore or condemn homosexuality. The SAMHSA link above is to The Memory Hole, btw. My original post on this was called How long before a Bush drone puts a stop to this?
The answer was 12 days. That's how long it took for a Bush drone to scrub a government web site of gay-positive content.
Since the neutered agency is now under the complete control of the administration's fundamentalist Base, an independent resource like 1-800-SUICIDE is ripe for the picking. Do you want suicide prevention in the hands of the Bush administration? Terrance throws it down.
To Read the Entire Hyperlinked Post
Also check out The All Spin Zone's post Suicide is Painless
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