Social class bias of suicide prevention volunteers

This study investigated the influence of a suicidal client's social class on suicide prevention volunteers' evaluation of a telephone conversation between a suicidal client and a volunteer: 32 suicide prevention volunteer Ss rated an artificially constructed transcript of a segment of a call to a suicide-and crisis-intervention service on 16 suicide and personality scales. One-half of the Ss rated the transcript appended with a lower-class social history, defined mainly by education and income; the other half rated the same transcript appended with a middleclass social history. The evaluations of the caller were not influenced by the caller's social class, except for two scales assessing intellectual functioning and emotional disturbance, on which the lower-class caller was rated more negatively than the middle-class caller. Concern about the care and treatment of psychological problems in lower-class persons has been a hallmark of community mental health. The concern has been motivated by data indicating that lower-class patients are accepted into psychotherapy relatively less often than middle- or upper-class patients (Brill &