A new report indicates that phone lines for suicide prevention hotlines lit up after Trump scored his upset win over Hillary Clinton.
It’s already been called the most stressful campaign in modern memory, and now a new report indicates that people were calling in to suicide hotlines in record numbers after Donald Trump’s shocking upset election win over Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8. LGBTQ individuals in particular seemed distraught over the news, and phone lines at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline were lighting up in the early morning hours of Nov. 9, when the election had been called.
A CNN report indicated that the network fielded 660 calls between 1 and 2 a.m., two to three times the normal rate. The phone calls started to rise during Election Night and only continued their rise as polls closed and the returns started coming in, with Trump dramatically turning the tables.
It was the biggest surge in suicide calls since 2014, after Robin Williams killed himself, the report states. Of course, it’s not fair to entirely blame Trump. The election served more as a trigger for people already suffering from extreme anxiety and depression caused by events in their own lives.
A large portion of callers were LGBTQ, who were most likely to say they were scared about the outcome.
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