The Headquarters Counseling Center ArchiveLawrence, Kansas · 1969–2020

The Headquarters Counseling Center Archive

Counting: how the numbers were reported

What a Kansas crisis centre counted and published at county, state and national level, why small-area suicide statistics are treacherous, and where current data lives.

Aerial view of Kansas farmland at golden hour showing a geometric grid of fields and a tree-lined creek
Douglas County, Kansas — a population small enough that annual counts swing wildly for no reason at all.

Read this before any number below

This page is about how a small organisation reported numbers, not about what the numbers are. That is a deliberate choice. Republishing fifteen-year-old suicide statistics as though they described the present would be both wrong and, in this subject, careless.

Three levels

The centre maintained a three-tier statistics section — Douglas County, the state of Kansas, and the United States — which for a community nonprofit in the 2000s was unusual. Most local organisations reproduced a national figure and stopped. Publishing the county number takes deliberate work: it means going to state vital-statistics reporting, extracting a small-area count, and putting it in front of a community that will recognise the scale.

It also means publishing a number that will not behave. The centre's own myths page stated that in recent years between five and eleven lives had been lost to suicide annually in the county. That range is the honest way to present small-area data, and it quietly makes the point that a single year's county figure is close to meaningless on its own.

Why small-area numbers mislead

In a county of that size, a move from five deaths to eleven is a doubling in percentage terms and is entirely consistent with nothing whatsoever having changed. Random variation in small counts is large. Yet a doubling is exactly the sort of figure that generates a headline, a funding round, or a panic about a particular school or workplace.

There is a second, subtler problem the centre would have known well. Suicide counts depend on how deaths are classified, and classification practice varies by jurisdiction, by coroner and over time. Comparisons across counties or across decades are comparisons of recording practice as much as of anything else.

The professional answer is to use multi-year aggregates and age-adjusted rates rather than single-year counts, and to treat any small-area movement as provisional until it persists. Presenting a range across recent years, as the centre did, is a reasonable lay approximation of that discipline.

The numbers the centre counted about itself

The more distinctive statistics the centre published were about its own service rather than about deaths, and those are covered in detail under how a volunteer crisis line worked. In summary, for 2010 it published a full classification of roughly twenty-two thousand contacts, reported total usage 7.9 per cent above the previous year, and recorded depression and suicide-risk contacts 4,492 times — the figure it converted into the memorable form of over twelve a day.

Service-use statistics and mortality statistics answer completely different questions and are constantly conflated in public discussion. A rise in crisis-line contacts is not evidence of a rise in suicide; it is at least as likely to be evidence that more people know the number. The centre was careful about this distinction in its published material, and the distinction is worth carrying forward.

What it could not count

The centre asked callers for no demographic information, so its own service data could not be broken down by age, sex, race or location. It said outright that it could not report how many of its counselling calls came from university students, despite the university being its founding constituency and a funder.

It also, by the nature of the work, could not count the outcome that would have justified everything: what happened after a call ended. That absence is the reason it built the caller-outcome instrument described under measuring whether a crisis line works — the only measurement available to it was the one it could take before the caller hung up.

Where the current numbers are