The Telephone as a "Therapeutic Instrument": The Establishment of Suicide and Crisis Hotlines in Canada, ca. 1961–1979
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Suicide rose in importance as a major public health concern in post-war Canada, concurrent with the relative decline of infant and childhood mortality and the rise of the behavioural sciences. In response to a perceived crisis in suicides during the 1960s and 1970s, a new technology—the rotary telephone—was reconceived as a "therapeutic instrument" to reach people in crisis. Voluntary and religious groups began establishing "suicide hotlines" across the country as a participatory public health intervention aimed at saving lives. However, as suicide rates continued their seemingly inexorable rise, suicide hotlines witnessed a discursive transformation, away from a goal of reducing suicide rates and toward mental health crisis intervention more broadly. Abstract: Le suicide est devenu un problème de santé publique majeur au Canada après la guerre, parallèlement au déclin relatif de la mortalité infantile et juvénile et de l'essor des sciences comportementales. En réponse à une crise perçue dans le domaine du suicide au cours des années 1960 et 1970, une nouvelle technologie, le téléphone à cadran, a été repensée comme un « instrument thérapeutique » permettant d'atteindre les personnes en situation de crise. Des groupes bénévoles et religieux ont commencé à mettre en place des « lignes d'écoute téléphonique » à travers le pays, dans le cadre d'une intervention participative de santé publique visant à sauver des vies. Cependant, alors que les taux de suicide continuaient leur ascension apparemment inexorable, les « lignes d'écoute téléphonique » ont connu une transformation discursive, s'éloignant de l'objectif de réduction effective des taux de suicide pour s'orienter vers une intervention plus large en cas de crise de santé mentale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".