The Foster Care Election Fall Out: Eric Goes to DBHDD
A courtesy heads up, this post talks about suicide. If you or anyone you know is contemplating suicide, please call 988.
My last post about the Foster Care Election, yielded a surprising result. Commissioner Kevin Tanner at DBHDD had reached out through Dear Leader/Editor/Publisher/Former Rep/Current Lobbyist/Always hopeful Reds fan Scot Turner to chat. I was surprised. Shocked really. Why would he want to talk to me? I mean he does things, and I’m just a blogger.
It turns out that my hope for better inter-agency process and my experience with the Crisis Line caught his attention.
Whoops, did I say something that isn’t defensible?
Nope, he genuinely wanted to know about that fateful day on 3 Jan 2026 and The Wife ™ and I’s experience.
We ended up talking to his deputy who oversees the Crisis program, and we had an in-person meeting with him as well. I hope we offered constructive feedback with our experience. We were there for an hour. Some of it was social and jaw jacking, other parts I think were constructive. It was also kind of cool that I could almost see my house from the conference room.
One thing I learned was about a pioneering relationship between DBHDD and Georgia Poison Control.
It turns out that a non-zero number of people call Poison Control to find out just how much of a given substance to take, medicine, chemicals, etc., to carry out a suicide plan. I had never considered that possibility before. Though it makes sense, if one is operating from the perspective of suicide as a goal. Poison control has the information about deadly things. If you want to make a complete suicide plan, why not make a call and get information from the experts on deadly substances?
In 2024, this scenario was less than 1% of the total calls to Georgia’s Poison Control. But it was still 533 people. For comparison, there are 180 cities in Georgia with 533 or less people.
By implementing a new protocol for handing folks off from GPC to 911 or 988 there is a new way to monitor mental health in the state. There is also a new way to save lives.
Georgia is the first to implement this. It’s also cheap. Everyone already has their funding, you just have to coordinate the protocol and the handoffs.
Academic review paywalled here, but also available through Galileo and your local public library.
We often talk about Georgia being the Number 1 state in which to do business. We don’t often talk about some of the other things we are doing on the human services side. It isn’t sexy. It doesn’t raise tax revenue. But what it does do is make Georgia a more pro life state. A state that cares for it’s more vulnerable populations is a more attractive state in which to live.
Mental health conditions have no boundaries and can affect anyone regardless of socioeconomic status, race, gender, marital status, or sexual orientation. I for one think it’s pretty cool that one small change and one protocol improving the inter-agency process can save a potential 500+ lives a year. over 20 years that’s 14,230 lives. In a state with more than 10 million people, that’s a drop in the bucket statistically. But remember that’s a person that was able to survive and start a family.
Methodology
For the population estimate I used the following equation: P_{t+1} = 1.03P_t + 533.
Assumptions. This adds a new cohort each year of the 533 people who called poison control and were diverted away from suicide. It assumes that without the diversion that they would have completed their suicide plan. This also assumed that the population would grow at 3% because surely some of these folks would go on to have families/children. Finally, to make the math easier, i assumed that none of the cohort or their children died over the 20 years. I’m not a demographer but sometimes I’m actually an optimist. Perplexity.AI did the math for me.
