Sen. Dan Thatcher’s new 988 mental health emergency hotline in Utah

As Utah’s legislative general session enters its final weeks, lawmakers are scrambling to pass several key bills to Gov. Spencer Cox’s desk.

Sen. Daniel Thatcher, who represents part of Tooele and Salt Lake counties in the state’s 12th District, recently saw the advancement of a key piece of legislation he sponsored regarding the state’s dispatch response to mental health emergencies.

According to the CDC, Utah ranked fifth in the nation in deaths by suicide in 2019. Last year, Mental Health America ranked the Beehive State at 50, one removed from dead-last Oregon for adults that have higher instances of mental illness and lower access to care.

For the better part of a decade, Thatcher has been working tirelessly to combat the prevalence of suicide in the state and traces his efforts back to a cry for help from a constituent in Tooele, eight years ago.

In 2013, Thatcher received a call from a parent in Tooele County, whose son had been contemplating suicide all night and had received little assistance after communicating with emergency dispatch.

Thatcher said the parent was told by an operator to take his son to the ER, get him to a therapist and “bring him back if he hurts himself.”

This was not an acceptable response for Thatcher.

Over his 10-year stint in office, the senator from West Valley worked alongside some of the states’ most influential leaders in an attempt to address such deficiencies in the police department’s response to mental health emergencies.

One of Thatcher’s early successes in his quest was the creation of the Safe UT app, which was created in 2015. The app — available in both Google and Apple app stores — utilizes a variety of communication methods to provide real-time crisis response to youth and adults across Utah. Thatcher says the state’s suicide rate, despite the high-ranking in the country, has stabilized. As a result of the heightened anxiety during the pandemic, calls to crisis lines have gone up by 20% and the calls themselves are lasting 38% longer than pre-COVID interactions. Thanks to lifelines such as Safe UT, the suicide rate has not increased over the past year.

Currently, Thatcher is working to build on this success and is sponsoring three bills aimed to further enhance Utah’s response to mental and behavioral emergencies. His signature piece is SB 155 – the Mental Health Crisis Assistance bill, which establishes a new 988 suicide prevention hotline to work in accordance with the nationwide number introduced by the FCC in July of 2020. This three-digit emergency line will serve as a suicide prevention 911 replacement and help expedite responses to those in need, alleviating the call load from other emergency response hotlines.

This legislation has been a long time coming, as the idea took shape in 2013 and did not gain traction until 2016, when Rep. Chris Stewart and former Sen. Orrin Hatch got involved in the project.

Thatcher’s plan for the new 988 emergency number deals with the pitfalls that go along with calling 911 emergency responders for mental health crises. Many emergency responders don’t have adequate mental health crisis training, according to Thatcher. With 988, callers will be in contact with trained professionals who specialize in mental health related crises, Thatcher said.

The bill is currently waiting in the Senate Rules Committee where funding for the system will be determined, but 988 will be fully-operational some time next year.

It is likely that, in order for the hotline to be operational, a telcom fee will need to be in place similar to the fees residents pay for other emergency response services.

Thatcher believes mental health treatment is as crucial to a society as any other service provided by the government. His hope is that funding will come without any hitches. In order for there to be a “fully-robust” system, he said, the fees are the only way the FCC would allow the line to be operable.

“We wouldn’t tolerate a government that didn’t provide police, fire and ambulance. Why do we tolerate a government that fails to provide mental health?

“If there’s one thing that we’ve proven with the Safe UT app, it’s that if you pick up the phone — they live,” Thatcher said.