Cindy Gordon talks with a driver Friday while manning the Lancaster Public Transit call center.
Sacramento, California – As California finalizes a new state budget, organizations that operate mental health warm lines — phone services offering emotional support and connection during non-crisis moments — are grappling with deep cuts, layoffs, and the quiet unraveling of a system many have come to rely on.
For thousands of Californians, warm lines are not emergency services, but lifelines. Staffed by peer counselors with lived experience, they provide empathy and grounding for those facing isolation, depression, trauma, or day-to-day struggles with mental health. They are the phone call someone makes before things fall apart.
Now, many of these services are being forced to scale back or shut down entirely.
Parents Anonymous, which serves an estimated 24,000 people annually, has already begun laying off staff after its request for $3 million in annual state funding went unanswered in the latest budget deal. Among those affected is Pomona resident Antonia Rios, a mother of seven who calls the helpline up to seven times a week. Rios has battled anxiety, bipolar disorder, and PTSD rooted in childhood trauma. The helpline, she says, gave her dignity and understanding when other systems made her feel like a burden. Now, she isn’t sure where she’ll turn.
In Orange County, the local chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness is preparing to lay off 127 workers — many of them former callers who were hired and trained as peer counselors. Their warm line currently fields around 900 calls a day, offering support to individuals, families, and even law enforcement. Soon, many of those phones will go unanswered.
The San Francisco-based California Peer Run Warm Line also took a significant hit, receiving just $5 million of the $15 million it requested. That reduction will shutter its Spanish-language line and dramatically limit its capacity to serve diverse communities, including Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, and Black Californians. The nonprofit that runs the line also provides training and infrastructure for other culturally specific services, many of which are now in jeopardy.
This pullback arrives at a moment when demand is rising. The San Francisco warm line received 40,000 calls in a single month this spring — a number it now expects to field across an entire year due to funding limitations.
While California has invested in other mental health initiatives — including the 988 crisis line and youth-focused mental health apps — peer-run warm lines occupy a different space. They are low-cost, preventative services meant to keep people connected and supported before crisis hits.
But amid a shifting budget landscape and new funding priorities under Proposition 1, many of these essential services are being sidelined.
For some, the most disheartening part is not simply the cuts themselves, but what they represent: a move away from listening before the emergency, toward waiting until it’s too late.
