THE COUNTY BUDGET CRISIS : A Bleak Outlook : L.A.’s Pioneering, Renowned Suicide Prevention Center Could Shut Down as Early as Aug. 1

One night last winter, in a third-floor apartment, a woman sat in the dark with a brown leather purse. The purse was on the coffee table, and it held three plastic bottles of pills, and she looked at it and wept.

She was 41. She had no job, no lover, no close friends. Since the suicide of her father three years before, she had been haunted by the thought of death. And here it was again. She asked herself: “Should I or shouldn’t I?”

She thought about her mother and called her; her mother was not home. But there was the phone, and so Carmen Kalafate dialed again. “Suicide Prevention Crisis Center. Can I help you?” a voice asked.

“If it wasn’t for that hot line,” the Studio City accountant now says, “I probably would have killed myself.”

These days, the program to which Kalafate turned is facing a different crisis. The budget emergency that has gripped Los Angeles County has quietly grown to include the historic Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Center, whose 36-year-old hot line was the first crisis line in America.

Jay Nagdimon, who directs the center and its 125 volunteers, said he was notified two weeks ago that the county Department of Mental Health had scratched the center’s $126,560-a-year county contract as part of its effort to scrape together the department’s $11.1-million share of mandated budget cuts.

The recommendation, which goes to a public hearing before the Board of Supervisors today, effectively would shut down the suicide hot line and the center’s other programs because their funding comes almost exclusively from the county, Nagdimon said. If the mental health budget is approved, he said, “as of Aug. 1 we’ll shut down. Where our callers will go, I don’t know.”

Mental Health Director Areta Crowell confirmed that the program is one of four small contracts she has axed in her cost-reduction plan.

“It’s very difficult to cut any one of our programs. It’s like cutting off limbs,” Crowell said. “But I am having to choose between these and treatment personnel.”

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The turmoil over the county’s money problems has stretched in recent weeks to constituencies small and large. After ordering $257 million in cuts last month, the supervisors have found themselves in the position of having to slash another $1 billion from the proposed budget or find that amount in other sources of revenue. Hat in hand, they have gone to Sacramento only to be rebuffed; a plan to raise the money by taxing alcohol has mainly raised doubts.

And so the cutting has commenced, and the recommendations for cuts to come--in parks and libraries, welfare offices and emergency rooms. The suicide prevention funding, Crowell noted, is the least of it. Her proposed budget also eliminates more than 40 jobs, reduces 42 contracts and shuts down a counseling program for battered women in Long Beach, a halfway house in the San Gabriel Valley and a crisis house for the homeless in Santa Monica.

For advocates of the Suicide Prevention Center--and the desperate thousands comforted through it each year--there is little solace in the argument that theirs is not the only program in jeopardy. For years, the center has made do with subsistence funding, leveraging its ration of public money with a dedicated corps of unpaid counselors.

In addition to running the hot line, which handles 16,000 calls a year, the center also oversees several support groups for the bereaved, operates a youth suicideprevention program in the schools, and trains SWAT members and hospital workers in crisis counseling.

But the bulk of the center’s budget, Nagdimon said, goes into the training of those volunteers, who, after a rigorous six weeks of instruction, man the 24-hour phone lines over which the troubled reach for help. The director is paid less than $30,000 a year. Routinely, he said, the program ends the year $25,000 to $50,000 in the red, which has so far been absorbed by Family Service of Los Angeles, a private nonprofit agency under whose auspices the center is housed.

Last year, Nagdimon had to hold a yard sale to finance buying a computer for the hot line. His most recent fund-raising gambit is a raffle for a trip to Bali. So far, only $300 has been raised, in part because there is no money to publicize the center’s cause.

“A lot of people sit in their apartments alone and have no idea there’s someone here to turn to,” said Steve Wolfe, a schoolteacher who has been a crisis volunteer for 1 1/2 years. “We’re the side of the story that doesn’t get heard about.”

As he spoke, leaning back at a hand-me-down table in the hot line’s two-room headquarters, two fellow volunteers hunched over the phones in the glassed-in booths that run along the back office like confessionals. On one line was a homeless man in a drugstore phone booth with $10 in his pocket and voices in his head; on the other was a topless dancer with a broken heart.

“My friend says if I really wanted to kill myself, I wouldn’t be talking to you,” the dancer mused bitterly, “but the whole time, I’m here sticking this knife into my hand and getting mad that it’s not drawing blood and going to get a razor blade, and she doesn’t even know.”

Under the table, a cockroach the size of a Matchbox car dashed across the floor and into a garbage can. The air in the room was close, and smelled of old coffee, non-dairy creamer and dust.

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Death by suicide is as old as mankind, but the study of suicide prevention is a fairly recent phenomenon. Much of what has been learned, experts say, is rooted in the early work of the Suicide Prevention Center and the two Los Angeles psychologists who founded it.

Edwin Shneidman and Norman Farberow, who are both semi-retired now and living in Los Angeles, pioneered the study of the underlying causes of suicide in research that dates back half a century. Knowledge that is now commonplace--about the subtle warnings, for example, that the suicidal give off--sprang largely from their research, psychologists say.

The Suicide Prevention Center, which they founded in 1958 with backing from the National Institute of Mental Health, “was the premier and first major suicide prevention center in the country,” said Alan Berman, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based American Assn. of Suicidology.

From its first incarnation--a single phone line on the fourth floor of an abandoned tuberculosis hospital on the grounds of what is now County-USC Medical Center--the center grew to become the model for hundreds of crisis centers and hot lines worldwide, Berman said.

A plaque of appreciation outside the center’s offices lists scores of agencies modeled after the facility, some as far away as Australia and Japan. “The benefits of your pioneering efforts have extended around the world,” the plaque says, “and from around the world we extend our gratitude.”

More poignant is the gratitude of callers such as Kalafate. Each volunteer, it seems, has a story of someone who called back to say thanks.

“All I know,” Kalafate said, “was that night, there was no one else to call.”