Suicide Hotline lessons, first day report

So yesterday was my first day for the lessons, some very releiving news is that its far less intense then I had assumed. It seems there was an error sending me my schedual and I assumed it was about 3-4 weeks of 7 hours training every day. Fortunantly its (normally) only saturdays that are taken up due to most people having courses or jobs to attend to. This means it'll be a lot longer in training then I thought but I can't complain after how fun it was. Going to have to change some plans that assumed I'd have the weekends after a month, but that's relatively minor.

The other trainees are from very varied backgrounds and levels of expertise. It was a tremendous amount of fun actually talking with the psychology students that were both studying and had recently finished among them. It's very rare I've had chances to talk about such since I left my last University.

For a first day consisting of a lot of the very typical stuff one would expect of initial job training, getting to know each other, the most basic stuff about how to act and what not to do it then got surprisingly in depth. Discussing the mechanics of the brain, the processes of people in crisis'. I loved it. I winded up taking several pages of notes that I've spent the last couple hours trying to transcribe to a digital format. It's a pain, I've barely hand written more then a single a4 page's worth of writing a year in the last decade due to being a technophile and my handwriting's suffered as a result. This is on top of my developmental years having my primary (left) hand slapped when I wrote with  so I never really had the skill to begin with.

Still I suspect it was a smarter choice then to bring my netbook using persona 3 wallpapers to the course. I suspect that could cause just a few complications.

A real nice piece was, while we took a break, I was having my food at the same time as someone in the position we're training for with about a year's experience having their own 10 minute break. I got a lot of examples for the typical calls, received, as well as some interesting outliers. What's most interesting is there's no real single point people call the hotline. People considering suicide do call, but given how rare people talking about suicide and acting on it are, its far more often 'simply' concern about things. Criminals use it as a sort of confessional, people that are stricken by grief over the deaths of loved ones. The outliers were absolutely bizarre.

Next week will be getting into the real meat of the subject with actual phone work, as I understand. Listening in on calls and learning the behavior. Something I'll look forward to, but, for now, I think I'm finally going to play some games I've really not had a chance at all week.