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At least 40 killed in blast at Pakistan convention The Washington Post

‘It may not be the solution, but it lets you touch someone who can send you on a path to where you will get the help you need.’

Colleen DeGuzman KFF HEALTH NEWS

The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline’s 988 hotline marked its one-year milestone this month. Mental health experts say the three-digit number made help more accessible than before. The hotline was designed with the idea that people experiencing emotional distress are more comfortable reaching out for help from trained counselors than from police and other first responders through 911. Since the federally mandated crisis hotline’s new number launched in July 2022, 988 has received about 4 million calls, chats, and texts, according to a KFF report– up 33% from the previous year. (The hotline previously used a 10-digit number,

— Xavier Becerra, Health and Human Services Secretary

800-273-8255, which remains active but is not promoted.) At a July press event, policymakers and mental health experts celebrated the hotline’s first-year successes as well as its additional $1 billion in funding from the Biden administration. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra described 988 as a “godsend” during taped remarks. “It may not be the solution,” he said, “but it lets you touch someone

who can send you on a path to where you will get the help you need.” Those same advocates recognized the dark reality represented by 988’s high call volume: The nation faces a mental health crisis, and there is still much work to be done. One year in, it’s also clear that the 988 hotline, a network of more than 200 state and local call centers, faces challenges ahead, including public mistrust and confusion.

It’s also clear the hotline needs federal and state funding intervention to be sustainable. Here’s a status check on where things stand:

What worked? The original 1-800 national mental health crisis hotline has operated since 2005. The huge increase in calls to 988 compared with those to the 1-800 number in just a year is likely linked to the simplicity of the three-digit code, said Adrienne Breidenstine, vice president of policy and communications at Behavioral Health System in Baltimore. “People are remembering it easily,” she told KFF Health News. According to a survey by NAMI and IPSOS

See Blast, Page A6

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A year with 988

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Eric Harkleroad/KFF Health News/TNS

An advertisement for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline’s 988 hotline is seen at a subway station in Washington, D.C.

At least 40 people were killed in a suspected suicide bomb blast targeting a political convention in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, raising new concerns over the mounting scale of attacks as the country prepares for a general election later this year. The blast struck a gathering for Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, near the border with Afghanistan, and injured nearly 200 people, according to the provincial information minister, Feroze Jamal Shah Kakakhel. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, or JUI, is a right-wing political and religious party led by hard-line cleric Maulana Fazlur Rehman, an ally of the Taliban leadership in neighboring Afghanistan. The party supports electoral politics in Pakistan – and is part of the

ruling coalition – but has taken ultraconservative positions on issues such as women’s rights. As many as 500 people attended the conference Sunday in the Bajaur district, as JUI prepares for the upcoming election, said Ayaz Khan, a party spokesman. Pakistan’s governing coalition agreed to dissolve Parliament next month, which would trigger a general election before the end of the year. Militant groups and more extremist parties had hoped to gain momentum in the lead-up to that vote, as Pakistan grapples with high inflation, a faltering economy, and tensions between the government and former prime minister Imran Khan. Similar gatherings like the one held in Bajaur on Sunday have been taking place across the country to mobilize supporters and voters.

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See 988, Page A6

THE WASHINGTON POST

No ‘Oppenheimer’ fanfare for those caught in first atomic bomb’s fallout The Washington Post

Paul Ratje/The Washington Post

Lucy Benavidez Garwood remembers being roused from sleep by the force of the world’s first nuclear explosion, the atomic bomb that in 1945 was secretly tested just beyond the southern New Mexico town where her family lived.

TULAROSA, N.M. — A strong rumble woke 13-year-old Lucy Benavidez Garwood in the darkness, shaking the three-room adobe house where she and her family lived and rattling dishes in the kitchen cupboard. Neighbors who gathered that morning agreed it must have been an earthquake.

They learned the truth several weeks later when U.S. forces attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The atomic bombs dropped on the two cities had been developed in Tularosa’s own backyard – that predawn test blast jolting communities across southern New Mexico, shooting a mushroom cloud 10 miles into the sky, then raining radioac-

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tive ash on thousands of unsuspecting residents. What happened here in the aftermath, surviving “downwinders” and their relatives say, is a legacy of serious health consequences that have gone unacknowledged for 78 years. Their struggles continue to be pushed aside; the new blockbuster film “Oppenheimer,” which spotlights the scientist

most credited for the bomb, ignores completely the people who lived in the shadow of his test site. Yet for all their ambivalence about the movie’s fanfare – the northern New Mexico city of Los Alamos, where J. Robert Oppenheimer located the Manhattan Project, just threw a 10-day festival See Bomb, Page A6

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