Yes. The volunteers spread out across the country would have a variety of roles. Some might be people helping out in office work, but some are peer support workers. They are volunteers, oftentimes people with lived experience of mental illness, who have received training through their branch to provide support. Some of them would be in crisis response, but not necessarily suicide response. That would be a higher level of training, which some of them would have received.
The services are quite different across the country. Depending on the kinds of crisis lines and the kinds of support that are being provided, there would be various types of involvement.
There would also be paid staff answering phones as well. What a lot of CMHAs have had to do across the country to respond to this surge issue is set up extra lines and fortify the systems underneath these telephone lines to be able to actually deal with these phone calls. They were repurposing staff who would have been running programs or doing other work to get them on the phone to handle the triage level of support for people right now.