The Ministry of Health and Welfare on Monday said that it has changed the number of the suicide prevention hotline to 1925, a homophonic in Chinese that sounds like the characters yi jiu ai wo (依舊愛我), meaning “still loves me.”
The change is expected to make the hotline easier to remember, while call centers can still be reached via the old number, 0800-788-995, until Dec. 20, the ministry said.
The hotline was established in 2005 and its operators are trained to provide general counseling, direct callers to appropriate healthcare facilities and intervene in urgent cases, it added.
Photo: Wu Liang-yi, Taipei Times
Last year, the hotline answered calls from about 78,000 people, of which about 13,000 expressed suicidal ideation and the operators prevented about 480 suicides, the ministry said.
The hotline answered 28,000 calls the year it was established, it said.
Other calls were mostly requests for general counseling or life advice and most callers were aged 25 to 44.
While the hotline’s services have been satisfactory, the telephone number was deemed unnecessarily long, the ministry said, adding that important hotlines dealing with urgent problems should be short.
People seem to easily recall shorter hotlines, such as the 113 child abuse prevention hotline, the 1919 food safety hotline and the 1966 elderly care request hotline, which prompted officials to change the suicide prevention hotline’s number, it said.
The ministry generally organizes its hotlines by order of urgency, with the most urgent using three and four digits, while the ones using 10 digits or starting with 0800 being the least urgent, it added.
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