| Summary: | The characteristics that identify chronic callers to telephone
crisis centres were investigated. The telephone workers from
four crisis lines identified and recruited subjects. Eight
chronic callers were interviewed by telephone. Subjects
participated in a structured interview, responding to questions
on their experiences with crisis lines, contacts with other
community services, their support network of friends and family,
their mental health and substance use, and major events in their
family history. Subjects telephoned from three to five times a
month to four times a day. They had been telephoning crisis
lines from 6 months to over 13 years. They usually telephoned
two or three different crisis lines regularly. Qualitative
analysis of the interview data consisted of three concurrent
activities: data reduction, data display, and drawing/verifying
conclusions. Analysis identified 17 chronic caller
characteristics common to most subjects: 5 personal
characteristics, 5 involving relationships and their support
network, 3 relating to their family background, and 4 concerning
their experience with counselling, therapy or other treatment.
Support, contact, esteem-building, friendliness and the telephone
volunteers emerged as positive characteristics from the subjects'
experiences with crisis lines. Poor "business" practice, call
management and "labelled" callers emerged as negative
characteristics from the subjects' experiences of crisis lines.
Callers also displayed eight characteristics distinguishing lower
frequency from higher frequency chronic callers based on the
frequency of telephoning. Three characteristics involved the
callers' relationship to the crisis lines; one regarded their
therapeutic history; and four concerned family history or special
others. Four global themes - victimization, esteem, isolation,
and connection - emerged across all callers for the information
they shared. The results point to the subjects' personal, family
and therapeutic histories feeding into a dynamic of ongoing
contact with crisis lines. The callers' increased use of crisis
lines accentuates the mismatch between chronic caller
characteristics and the crisis lines' goal of crisis
intervention. Telephone crisis centres are left to consider
different methods of managing chronic callers and how to better
work with those higher frequency chronic callers turning to the
crisis lines as a therapeutic resource. === Education, Faculty of === Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of === Graduate
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