BOISE — After a six-year hiatus, Idaho again has its own statewide suicide prevention hotline.    

    The toll-free telephone number for the new Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline — based at a private Boise location — is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Initial hours for the hotline are Monday through Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. — with the same hours on Fridays expected as an add-on in February 2013.

    ISPH organizers say they want the hotline to operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week, by this time next year — when the nascent service expects to begin its second year. That possible expansion of the hotline’s hours depends on additional funding, said ISPH Executive Director John Reusser.

    A lack of funding caused the previous Idaho suicide prevention hotline to be discontinued during the summer of 2006, but private and public financial resources enabled the Idaho Suicide Prevention Hotline to launch its volunteer-staffed services Monday afternoon, Reusser said.

    “It turns out that a simple phone call sometimes is more than enough to help turn a person’s life around,” said Peter Wollheim, a member of the Idaho Council on Suicide Prevention. “Very few who call a hotline will go on to kill themselves. Ever.” Reusser said the new suicide prevention hotline is starting out with 18 trained volunteers.

    Reusser at a Monday morning press conference thanked a number of organizations for helping to develop the ISPH over the past year, including the Institute of Rural Health at Idaho State University.

    During the time since 2006 without an Idaho-local hotline, suicide crisis calls within the state had been routed to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline Network.

    “But it’s important that Idahoans are taking care of their fellow Idahoans,” said David Brasuell, the administrator at the Idaho Division of Veterans Services. “The best service and resource is that service that’s local.”

    Idaho had been the only state of 50 in the United States that didn’t have an in-state suicide prevention hotline.

    “It pleases me to know that finally Idaho is joining the rest of the nation in starting its own suicide prevention hotline,” said state Sen.-elect Marv Hagedorn, R-Meridian.

    Landis Rossi, a member of the United Way Executive Committee, said that when she was a senior at Jerome High School in 1994, a friend committed suicide. The experience made a lasting impact on Rossi, she said.

    “Losing him would forever change me, because I saw first-hand the devastation losing a child to suicide has on family, friends, and the community as a whole,” said Rossi, also executive director of Catholic Charities of Idaho.

    Linda Peterson, the mother of Olympic skier and Idaho native Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, who took his own life in 2011, established the Speedy Foundation in her son’s honor. That foundation — among other donors — has donated $10,000 to the ISPH startup.

    “The hotline is a lifeline,” Peterson said. “It is critical in providing crisis intervention and information for the caller — and it doesn’t matter who the caller is.”    

    Several people indicated at the press conference on the steps of the Idaho Capitol building that many military veterans from the U.S. wars of the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan have been particularly vulnerable to suicide — an issue that needs to be addressed with local help such as the new suicide hotline in Idaho.

    Hagedorn said statistics from the Pentagon-based Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicate the U.S. loses 18 military veterans daily to suicide.

    Suicide — including health and welfare expenses — costs Idahoans $35 to $40 million annually, Hagedorn said.

    “So, it affects every Idahoan,” he said.