She picked up the phone and repeated these words, which had grown familiar, like a refrain in a song she never wanted to sing: "We're listening. We hear you. We've gone through similar things."
The person on the other end of the line, she said, "had typically just come out to themselves and really wanted to talk to someone." Isolation in that moment, said Greta Gustava Martela, can be dire.
She would know. Martela, a transgender woman, has been hospitalized five times for "suicidality," a term that encompasses suicidal ideation, planning, gestures, attempts and completed suicide. The first time was in 1995, said Martela, who is now 49.