LSU premed psychology senior Tai Lambert founded a Black mental Health hotline for Louisiana Residents. Lambert was got the idea when she was home in New York and saw an hotline being set up for Asian people being discriminated against because of COVID.
“I noticed there wasn’t some kind of service like that available to the black community especially with COVID, civil unrest having to see things on the news that are incredibly traumatizing and triggering and community violence at home violence stuff like that,” Lambert said.
Paying for therapy without insurance can get very expensive. For black people who are at a lower poverty level managing mental health is not something that gets talked about a lot. For Lambert this was a driving factor in why she felt a free hotline specifically for the black community was important.
“In my background mental health isn’t something that is taken seriously,” Lambert said. “I guess you would say and you see the effects of it in the household but you don’t really see that outreach or that resources are being made that are available to our community specifically.”
Not all the volunteers for the hotline are trained counselors but everyone has been extensively trained on how to talk to people who are calling. Volunteers received training for the same people who train volunteers for the LSU mental health hotline the phone.
“Some people just need someone to listen to them that won’t call the crazy for feeling how they feel,” Lambert said.
The hotline was originally supposed to launch on August 1 but is now rescheduled to launch September 7. Lambert decided to push the launch date when she saw that her volunteers needed more training.
“I really wanna make sure our volunteers are trained and ready to go,” Lambert said. “These are people lives that we are handling right now so I just want to make sure that they have the highest quality of training.”
The hotline is still looking for volunteers and asks that volunteers work 2 to 6 call hours per week. Anyone can apply to be a volunteer at the link below.
http://lsu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3qvjvjsLITPo7jL