Orange County mental health line makes huge cuts after funding is pulled

Orange County’s mental health warm line is set to lay off 127 staff members on Tuesday and faces an impending shutdown, as county officials pull the entire $5 million in funding allocated to run it following a change in California’s behavioral health spending.

The confidential phone and text service for people who are struggling emotionally, but not in crisis, serves 800 callers a day.

“If you were just starting to feel a little bit of anxiety, or maybe you didn’t talk to anyone during the day and you want someone to talk to, we were there 24/7,” said Amy Durham, the CEO of NAMI Orange County, the group that runs the line. “Well, that service is going away, and there’s no fix, there’s no place for them to go.”

The warm line is one of 38 programs Orange County is sunsetting after California voters approved Proposition 1 last year. The initiative changed how mental health dollars in the state are allocated, with money originally focused on early intervention and community programs redirected to helping people with serious mental illness get housing.

While advocates mourn the loss of any service in a mental health system that they see as under-resourced overall, some welcome the shift to prioritizing the sickest people.

“Our population is so underserved, we do not want that being diluted,” said Lisa Dailey, executive director of Treatment Advocacy Center, which focuses on people with psychotic illness. “I don’t want cuts anywhere, but if the refocusing of the programs actually leads to targeted interventions that are more likely to actually reach this population, then I would say that that’s great.”

For people suffering from hallucinations or delusions, a warm line is not very helpful, Dailey added.

But for students anxious about taking a test or getting bullied, or men in their 50s feeling the financial pressure of supporting a family, or for an elderly person who hasn’t seen their family in weeks and is thinking about suicide, Durham said, the warm line has been crucial. In the aftermath of the January wildfires that tore across Los Angeles, calls increased from 800 a day to 900 a day.

“Being heard is healing,” Durham said.

While there is no data on what happens to people after their 15-20-minute conversation, Durham believes the warm line has kept people out of crisis.

It also provided jobs for people with mental illness, many of whom had never worked before, she said, and a sense of pride in tapping their own struggles to help others in the community. These peer counselors were trained in de-escalation and how to identify callers who needed to be transferred to 988, the national suicide hotline.

When Durham learned the county planned to pull funding for operating the Orange County warm line — which at its peak was close to $11 million a year — she began looking for alternatives.

The state also operates a warm line, but its budget was also slashed this year, and Durham said people often have to leave a message and wait 48 hours for a call back. She’s found about 100 volunteers to staff the local line from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m., instead of 24/7, but even at the reduced capacity, she can only keep it going two to three more months.

“I think we’re going to see it get a lot worse before it gets better,” she said.