Fifty years of a crisis line in Lawrence, Kansas

What this site is

On 16 December 1969 a house on Massachusetts Street in Lawrence, Kansas opened its door and answered a telephone. The money came from a church: eight hundred and fifty-eight dollars and fifty-five cents, enough for three months. The idea came from a University of Kansas undergraduate. The staff were three students who lived in the building. It was called Headquarters.

It answered that telephone, without closing, for the next fifty years. It survived a state raid that destroyed its first programme, a near-collapse in the early 1970s, decades of funding crises, and a period when it existed as nothing more than a phone extension in a director's apartment. It became one of the oldest continuously operating crisis services in the United States, the accredited centre that answered national suicide-prevention calls for all of Kansas, and — by the time it ended — a twenty-person organisation.

This site is an independent archive of that history. It is built from the organisation's own published pages, captured between 2011 and 2020 and recovered from the Internet Archive. It is not the organisation, it does not speak for the organisation, and it cannot help anyone in a crisis.

Read this part first

The organisation itself did not end. It continues today as HeadQuarters Kansas, also known as Kansas Suicide Prevention HQ, and it answers 988 for the great majority of Kansas counties. If you are looking for the organisation rather than its history, you want hqkansas.org, not this site.

Why the history of a telephone line is worth keeping

Crisis lines are among the least documented institutions in public health. They are cheap, they are staffed largely by volunteers, they keep almost no records about the people who use them by deliberate design, and when they close their websites go with them. What survives tends to be a press release and a phone number that no longer works.

Headquarters was an exception in one useful respect: it published. It published its founding story in detail, including the parts that did not flatter it. It published its training model. It published a caller-outcome instrument with its methodology and its results, at a time when almost nobody could say whether a crisis line did anything at all. It published its position on how the media should and should not talk about suicide. Fifty years of that material is a case study, and it was about to disappear.

The pages here are organised around that material rather than around the organisation's own site structure. The original had six service sections and a menu of programmes, because it was selling services to a community that needed them. This archive has no services to offer, so it is arranged as a reference: what happened, how the practice worked, what was measured, and where the work went.

Where to start

• The history — fifty years, from a church cheque to a twenty-person organisation, including the collapse in the middle.
• How a volunteer crisis line worked — the model, the shift, the lineage back to London in 1953, and what the line was actually used for.
• Training volunteer counsellors — selection, the training model, and why the training was the product.
• Measuring whether it worked — an eleven-variable caller instrument, run three times a year, and what it found.
• Suicide prevention as a field — warning signs, the myths the centre spent decades correcting, and postvention.
• From a national toll-free line to 988 — how a Lawrence phone line ended up inside a national three-digit system.
• Current resources — where to actually go, today.
• Sources and method — what this archive is built from, and what was deliberately left out.

How this archive is written

Three rules govern everything here, and they are worth stating on the front page rather than burying them.

1. Nothing on this site is guidance for a person in crisis. Where the original site addressed a reader who was frightened for themselves or for someone else, this archive describes what the centre taught rather than instructing the reader. Action is routed to 988 every time.
2. No contact surface of any kind. No telephone numbers, no addresses, no e-mail addresses, no forms, no chat. Not for the archive, and not carried forward from the original for anybody else either.
3. No named individuals except documented leadership. Three people are named, by role, because the organisation's own published history is built around them. No volunteers, no staff roster, no board, no committee membership, and — absolutely — nothing about anyone who ever used the service.

The fourth rule is a borrowed one. In 2018 the organisation published its own position on how suicide should be discussed in the media, and it was a strict one. This archive is written to that standard: no method or means detail, no lethality specifics, no framing of a death as the consequence of an event, and no repetition of the numbers-as-spectacle habit that the centre spent thirty years arguing against. The subject of this archive set the standard the archive is held to, which seems like the right way round.