Suicide Announcement Calls to Emergency Services: The Interactional Context for Emotion Work in Call Taker's Efforts to Help the Caller

This paper uses conversation analysis to study emergency service calls where a caller is making a suicide announcement (declaring that they intend to kill themselves). A small collection of seven suicide announcement calls or call excerpts has been collected from publically released calls. The analysis of these data focuses on how call taker’s emotion work in the call can be performed, and when it is absent or delayed, and how timely accomplishment of such work could be a way of influencing the intended behavior of the caller. The results of the analysis are discussed in terms of their implications for call taker training.