Average Speed of Answer Is Now a Suicide Policy

Most people think this is about a bad sentence in a training video. It's not. It's about what happens when a human crisis system gets managed like a call-center dashboard.

Government Executive reports that newly reassigned Social Security Administration employees were trained to tell callers expressing suicidal thoughts that suicide is "only one option". I'm not claiming SSA wants harm. I'm claiming the agency expanded frontline exposure faster than it built crisis capacity.

Here's the machinery: performance pressure → workforce reassignment → thin training → moral risk at the edge.

• Reassign claims, IT and finance staff to phones after a brief three-hour training

• Prepare them for suicidal callers with language experts say is not best practice

• Emphasize keeping callers engaged and moving, while crisis professionals emphasize safety assessment and warm handoffs

• Place unlicensed staff in conversations that can escalate beyond administrative scope

SSA says employees are trained to connect callers to the 988 Lifeline and handle difficult calls with compassion. That matters. But escalation scripts are not the same thing as clinical judgment. Suicide prevention best practices explicitly caution against presenting suicide as an acceptable or normalized response.

This isn't a scandal about tone. It's a governance story about incentives. When agencies are pushed to improve phone metrics — answer faster, reduce backlog, stabilize service optics — they reallocate labor to the visible bottleneck. The invisible cost shows up in the call that was never meant to become a crisis line.

If the goal is safer outcomes, focus on structured crisis protocols, mandatory warm-handoff procedures, and real training time, not language tweaks inside a three-hour block.

When Average Speed of Answer becomes the performance north star, what other safety guardrails quietly move with it?