What do you do when you aren’t in a crisis that requires a suicide hotline but you need to talk to someone? For non-crisis needs, you call a “warmline.” In the Kansas City area, Mental Health America of the Heartland offers a warmline called The Compassionate Ear. MHAH describes their warmline as follows:
The Compassionate Ear Warmline 913-281-2251
Open 4pm-10pm daily, including holidays.
The Compassionate Ear Warmline is a peer-operated listening service for persons in need of support. The Warmline offers non-crisis supportive listening, coping strategies, information, and a reprieve from loneliness or isolation. This program also provides human service training and esteem-building employment opportunities for persons with mental illness; trained Warmline operators are staff with lived experience who work from their homes and use their knowledge to provide help without having to deal with transportation or other issues involved with getting to a worksite. The line does not handle crisis or suicide calls but has the training and capacity to transfer those calls appropriately.
NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, offers a list of warmlines by state. Importantly, this list also indicates those services who will accept calls from out of state.
Particularly in this stressful time of pandemic when we’re still keeping distance from others and activities are limited, a warmline may be useful. For those who are feeling the heaviness of isolation, the warmlines offer interactions with others.
If a warmline is helpful but not all the help that you need, I invite you to call or text me for a free 30-minute consultation at (816) 226-4678 to see if working with me might be helpful for you.
