The Helpline

Disclaimer: If you are having a medical or mental health emergency, please call someone you trust, 911, or one of these local or national hotlines first. We still welcome your call after you are in the process of receiving the immediate help that you need.

We are a short-term volunteer peer-counseling service. While we are guided by our Clinical Supervisors, we are no substitute for long-term, professional mental health care. Please visit MTUG's list of vetted providers or SQSHBook (once it launches) to contact a mental healthcare provider in the Greater St. Louis area.

COVID-19: To access mutual aid resources for COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease), visit STL Mutual Aid.

How to use the Helpline

Call in to process emotions, talk through resources, brainstorm ideas to assist a friend or loved one, or just to have a meaningful conversation.

• Step 1: Call us at 314-380-7774 or toll-free at 844-785-7774

  If you are in a mental health crisis:
  Press "1" to reach Behavioral Health Response's 24/7 crisis hotline.
  
  If you are not in a mental health crisis:
  Press "2" or wait on the line to reach SQSH. Once connected, one of our peer support volunteers will introduce the Helpline and share their name and pronouns.

• Step 2: Tell the volunteer if you are in a safe place to talk

  If you are not in a safe place to talk:
  The volunteer will work with you to explore options where you can talk with us most safely and comfortably.
  
  If you are in a safe place to talk:
  The volunteer will ask how they can address you. We welcome you to provide them with your name (or a pseudonym), as well as your pronouns if you’d like.

• Step 3: Talk to the volunteer

  The volunteer will then ask what you would like to talk about today. Go ahead and share as much or as little as you’d like with them. They're here to listen.

• Wrapping Up

  At the end of your call, we may ask you to fill out a brief, anonymous online survey about your call experience. We value your feedback and will use it to better serve you and the rest of our community. If you can, do something nice to take care of yourself and decompress afterwards! We welcome you to call back again anytime between Friday–Monday, 1PM–7PM.
  

  send us feedback

Helpline Features

• Operational Hours
  Friday - Sunday 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  
  We set our Helpline Hours on weekends because, outside of regular business hours, many folx lack access to mental health care and social support in school or work. If you had a bad week, or are just looking for someone in the LGBTQIA+ community to talk to over the weekend, call in!
• Highly Trained Volunteers
  Before taking calls, all Peer Support Helpline Volunteers undergo 50+ hours of intense training and evaluations on an extensive range of issues that LGBTQIA+ callers may face. Active volunteers continue to train and refresh their skills throughout the year. Learn more about the volunteer curriculum here.
• Confidential
  Volunteers will not disclose any information about a caller’s identity or situation. However, in situations where a caller is in immediate and severe danger, confidentiality may not be maintained. Read our Confidentiality & Privacy Policy here.
• Single Session
  Each call will be treated as a single session (i.e. not a continuing service with a case plan). Although volunteers undergo extensive, continual training, they are not qualified to provide ongoing counseling, and will thus provide referrals to outside resources if a caller requires ongoing mental health support. However, callers are welcome to use the Helpline more than once.
• No Intake Restrictions
  SQSH will be a generally open service with no referrals required for access. Callers self-identify their need for service and are welcome to call with a variety of issues and situations. The Helpline is a resource for all LGBTQIA+ callers in St. Louis (and their family, friends, and allies), but we will not turn away any caller for not fitting this description. Other St. Louis service providers are also welcome to call on behalf of their LGBTQIA+ client(s).
• Vetted Resources
  When making referrals and deciding which resources to include in our Resource Manual, we prioritize resources that are LGBTQIA-affirming, such as those that have been vetted by MTUG, Trans Education Service, PrideSTL, TransParent or PROMO, or that have been recommended to us by community members.
• Updated Resources
  We will continuously update our online Resource Manual (link here), and welcome related pamphlets and brochures to assist in making referrals for callers when needed.
• Feedback Oriented
  To continuously improve our service to the St. Louis LGBTQIA+ community, we always welcome feedback from Helpline users, and will regularly check our Feedback Forms to review input from Helpline users and community members.
• Volunteer Community
  We foster a tight-knit, supportive volunteer community to honor the principles of peer support within the SQSH community itself, reduce compassion fatigue, and minimize burnout. For every shift, at least two volunteers will be on call so that one can debrief, support, and switch roles with the other after a call. Volunteers may also earn practicum hours or academic credit.

Our Philosophy

At SQSH, we believe our services are better when we hold ourselves accountable to guiding principles and clinical-based models for peer counseling, community support, and helpline work. These include the following: caller led, harm reduction, wraparound service model, community-centered, confidentiality, transforamtive justice, intersectionality, accessibility, trauma-informed, self care & collective care, sustainability focused, limitations-aware, accountablity.

• Caller-Led
  We honor and value our callers’ life experiences, values, beliefs, and preferences and build on them as strengths. We believe that the caller is the expert who can best help themselves and we will work through issues at their pace. As such, we encourage callers to direct calls in a way that is most helpful for them.
• Harm Reduction
  We embrace a harm reduction model and value practical strategies that reduce negative impacts on people’s lives. We honor the goals and coping strategies of our callers, including behaviors that have been traditionally labeled as “maladaptive” or “unhealthy.” We acknowledge that complex social issues contribute to the caller's unique methods of survival.
• Wraparound Service Model
  We strive to respond to callers in a comprehensive way, treating their experiences as related and holistic instead of as isolated issues. We intend to provide resources that “wrap around” the caller to support them in all aspects of their life. We seek to incorporate the caller’s natural support systems to address their needs and will prioritize plans and resources that address multiple concerns.
• Community-Centered
  As as community-based resource, we focus on supporting callers in the context of their community. We aim to plug into and expand existing community networks and strengths. We are prepared to provide referrals and resources that do not rely on interaction with law enforcement or state-run institutions, and are willing to safety plan interventions for callers that do not rely on the criminal legal system.
• Confidentiality
  We value our callers’ privacy and right to withhold personal information from uses that they are not aware of or do not consent to. All caller information is protected by our Helpline Volunteers, Clinical Supervisors, and Practicum Supervisors. All caller information is considered confidential, including caller’s name, age, gender, occupation, relationship status, etc. All information regarding calls is discussed in private only with other SQSH volunteers, Clinical Supervisors, or Practicum Supervisor(s). All physical notes taken during calls remain within the locked areas of the SQSH office, or shredded within a month of the call. Read our full Confidentiality & Privacy Policy.
• Intersectionality
  Intersectionality is the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; a theoretical approach based on such a premise.
  —Oxford Dictionary
  
  Since the overlap of various social identities contributes to experiences of oppression, we acknowledge that the impacts of systemic discrimination exacerbate and compound queer people’s experiences. We pay special attention to the experiences of LGBTQIA+ people who hold multiple marginalized identities, such as Black, Indigenous, and other people of color in the community, low-income people, people with disabilities, and people who are undocumented. We aim to amplify the “letters” in the LGBTQIA+ acronym who have been less visible - including bisexual, pansexual, trans, intersex, asexual, aromantic, two-spirit, and other communities encompassed by the “+”. We strive to uplift these communities that experience unique challenges and barriers and that have historically been isolated in the national conversation around queer issues.
• Transformative Justice
  We value transformative justice: a way of addressing harm and building safety, accountability, and healing that relies on communities instead of the police, the law, or the state. We use a systems approach to understand caller’s challenges, seeing the problems of individuals as rooted in systems and conditions that need to be transformed, instead of putting the onus on the caller to solve their problems alone.
• Accessibility
  We know that we may not be able to reach incarcerated people, poor people, people in rural communities, people who find the St. Louis LGBTQIA+ community inaccessible, people far from St. Louis resources, people who are not “out,” children, young adults, people in abusive relationships who do not have the freedom to call our helpline, people who do not have access to a phone, people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, people who do not speak English fluently, people who are not comfortable with calling, and people who face other barriers. Over the years, we strive to be more accessible as a resource.
• Trauma-Informed
  We aim to apply a trauma-informed framework, which involves understanding, recognizing, and responding to the effects of trauma. Trauma-informed care emphasizes physical, psychological and emotional safety for both callers and volunteers, and helps survivors of trauma rebuild a sense of control and empowerment.
• Self Care & Collective Care
  We maintain that staying connected to each other helps us to resist burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary trauma. We work in advance to build the capacity to support each other, by strengthening relationships between our volunteers and building community within SQSH.
• Sustainability Focused
  We strive to achieve long-term stability in service of the St. Louis LGBTQIA+ community by thinking long-term while managing our day-to-day operations. This means that we vigilantly plan for the sustainability of our service and tailor our actions and goals according to realistic understandings of existing resources and limitations.
• Limitations Aware
  We aim to be conscious and transparent about the support that we can offer and the limitations of what we can provide. We acknowledge that our Helpline is often a Band-Aid solution to the caller’s needs. Our goal is to make ourselves available to as many LGBTQIA+ individuals in St. Louis as possible, but also to work the need for our Helpline out of existence.
• Accountability
  Our volunteers have gone through significant training and make conscious choices not to misuse our individual privilege as volunteers holding confidential information about our callers. As an organization, we make conscious choices not misuse our institutional power as a Helpline and a resource for the local LGBTQIA+ community.
• Structural Competency
  The structural competency movement aims to understand disparities at the level of neighborhoods, institutions, and policies. Our volunteers are not only taught to be empathetic and sensitive to our callers' social identities, but also trained to understand the upstream factors (such as heterosexism, transphobia, racism, and poverty) that put someone in distress.