Mental Health Support Hotlines as Capacity-Limited Services: Joint Modeling of Demand, Assessment, and Unassessed Calls
Abstract
Mental health support hotlines log help-seeking call attempts in real time, yet limited service capacity allows only a small proportion of calls to be answered and assessed. The time of every attempt is recorded, whereas issue types and marks such as caller demographics and crisis severity are observed only for assessed calls. Caller anonymity also prevents linking repeated attempts to the same individual. Nevertheless, service planning and crisis monitoring require estimating unassessed demand, recovering temporal patterns in call content, and quantifying how much the partially observed marks improve these estimates. We develop a Joint Marked Dynamic Factor Model (JM-DFM) in which a shared low-dimensional latent state drives attempt intensity, issue composition, and mixed-type mark distributions. We establish identifiability, prove consistency of the proposed sieve estimator, and show that incorporating marks improves the asymptotic estimation precision. The proposed framework is then applied to records of 68,371 call attempts to China's national 12356 mental health support hotline. We estimate that about 35 unassessed attempts per day involve suicidal ideation, representing a higher proportion than among assessed calls. Incorporating the marks narrows the latent-state uncertainty bands by 18% to 49%, most during periods with few issue-labeled calls.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026mental,
title = {{Mental Health Support Hotlines as Capacity-Limited Services: Joint Modeling of Demand, Assessment, and Unassessed Calls}},
author = {Siliang Zhang and Jing Ouyang},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.38813},
eprint = {2609.38813},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38813},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Mental Health Support Hotlines as Capacity-Limited Services: Joint Modeling of Demand, Assessment, and Unassessed Calls
AU - Siliang Zhang
AU - Jing Ouyang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/30
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.38813
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38813
AB - Mental health support hotlines log help-seeking call attempts in real time, yet limited service capacity allows only a small proportion of calls to be answered and assessed. The time of every attempt is recorded, whereas issue types and marks such as caller demographics and crisis severity are observed only for assessed calls. Caller anonymity also prevents linking repeated attempts to the same individual. Nevertheless, service planning and crisis monitoring require estimating unassessed demand, recovering temporal patterns in call content, and quantifying how much the partially observed marks improve these estimates. We develop a Joint Marked Dynamic Factor Model (JM-DFM) in which a shared low-dimensional latent state drives attempt intensity, issue composition, and mixed-type mark distributions. We establish identifiability, prove consistency of the proposed sieve estimator, and show that incorporating marks improves the asymptotic estimation precision. The proposed framework is then applied to records of 68,371 call attempts to China's national 12356 mental health support hotline. We estimate that about 35 unassessed attempts per day involve suicidal ideation, representing a higher proportion than among assessed calls. Incorporating the marks narrows the latent-state uncertainty bands by 18% to 49%, most during periods with few issue-labeled calls.
ER -