Guilt After Leaving a Pet Behind: What the Research Documents, and Where to Get Help Now

Talk to Someone Now

These three lines are open 24 hours a day, every day. Every number and every phrase below was read on that organization’s own website on August 11, 2026.

Disaster Distress Helpline. SAMHSA’s page for this line, marked Last Updated 09/26/2025, says: “Call or text 1-800-985-5990.” In Spanish, the same page says: “Llama o envía un mensaje de texto 1-800-985-5990 presiona “2.”” For Deaf and Hard of Hearing ASL callers it says: “Please text or call the Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990 using your preferred Relay provider.” SAMHSA describes the service as “available 24/7 to all residents in the U.S. and its territories who are experiencing emotional distress related to natural or human-caused disasters” and states: “There is no need to give any identifying information when you contact DDH.” Read the next sentence too, so a question at the end of the call does not surprise you: “The counselor may ask you for some basic information at the end of the call, but these questions are optional and intended to help SAMHSA keep track of the types of calls it receives.”

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call 988, text 988, or chat online at 988lifeline.org. Its site states: “The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential.” Its Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Hearing Loss page states that you can reach 988 Videophone by calling 988 with a VP number, that you can “Send any message to 988 to start a text conversation”, and, for TTY users: “Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.” A Spanish-language site runs at 988lifeline.org/es/, and states: “La línea 988 está disponible 24/7/365. Sus conversaciones son gratuitas y confidenciales.”

Veterans Crisis Line. Its site publishes “Dial 988 then Press 1”, “Text 838255”, and a chat option, describes itself as “24/7, confidential crisis support for Veterans and their loved ones”, and states: “You don’t have to be enrolled in VA benefits or health care to connect.”

Talking to a licensed mental health professional about this is a reasonable next step, and it is one you can take at any point, including now.

If what you need is practical disaster help rather than counseling, SAMHSA’s Disaster Distress Helpline page also directs readers to “Call 211 for information about disaster-related evacuations, shelters, food and clothing distribution, volunteer opportunities, and other resources and referrals. Or visit the national 211 Call Center website to find the 211 information and referral center nearest you.”

What This Page Is, and What It Will Not Do

You searched a sentence about your own animal, and most of what comes back is either a listicle of things to feel or a directory of phone numbers that stopped working years ago. Both of those are worse than useless at the moment you are reading them.

So four commitments, stated up front, because the failure modes on a page like this are specific.

No verdict on you. This page does not tell you that you did nothing wrong, that your guilt is irrational, or that you should feel some other way. Nobody writing a web page has met you, knows what your evacuation looked like, or is in a position to make that call. What we can do is report, accurately and with citations you can open, what one peer-reviewed study documented about the circumstances of a specific disaster. That is reporting about an event. It is not a ruling about you.

No diagnosis, no timeline, no exercises. There is no stage chart on this page, no prediction about how long anything lasts, and no instruction to write a letter, light a candle, breathe a certain way, or keep a journal. Those belong to a clinician who is actually working with you, if you want one, and this page says plainly and more than once that arranging that is a reasonable thing to do.

Every phone number carries the date it was read. Every hotline on this page was opened on that organization’s own website on August 11, 2026, and the phrasing is quoted from it. Further down, there is a documented example of why that matters, involving a helpline that shut down in 2018 and is still printed on a veterinary school’s resource page today.

One study, quoted rather than summarized. The research section below draws on a single paper. It is quoted directly, its limits are stated in the authors’ own words, and where the paper is reporting somebody else’s research rather than its own findings, this page says so.

The One Study That Looked Directly at This

The paper is “Pet Loss in an Urban Firestorm: Grief and Hope after Colorado’s Marshall Fire” by Leslie Irvine of the University of Colorado Boulder and Casara Andre of the Front Range Veterinary Medical Reserve Corps. It was published in the journal Animals on January 26, 2023, it is open access, and the full text was read for this page on August 11, 2026.

What it studied: the Marshall Fire, which began in open grassland in Boulder County, Colorado on December 30, 2021 and became what the paper calls an urban firestorm when it reached dense neighborhoods. The paper’s own summary of the scale reads: “Within six hours, the Marshall Fire destroyed 1084 homes and damaged 149 more, along with 30 commercial structures”. The sentences that follow it belong with it: “It burned over 6000 acres. It displaced over 30,000 residents and 2 people lost their lives.”

How it studied it: interviews with eight owners whose animals died or were believed to have died, interviews with two staff members at the receiving animal shelter, discussion sessions with veterinary professionals, and analysis of news coverage, the county’s evacuation orders, and a community Facebook group that the paper says “within days, the group garnered over 20,000 members.” The authors state that the interviews were “conducted either by phone or by Zoom”, ranged from 30 to 60 minutes, and “occurred within two weeks of the event.”

The research questions, in the paper’s own words: “(1) What prevented pet owners from evacuating their pets to safety? (2) What, if anything, might have helped them save their pets?”

Note the framing. Not why did they choose to leave the animals. What prevented them.

On the number of animals

The paper refuses to publish a hard death toll, and it explains why. Its Simple Summary states: “Although a precise count of animal deaths is not possible, it is likely that over 1000 pets died.” In the body it puts the same hedge differently: “although the number of companion animals who died in the Marshall Fire can never be precisely determined, conservative estimates place it over 1000.”

Two obstacles are named. “The first is the absence of a comprehensive pre-disaster census of owned animals.” The paper states that “Although the City of Louisville requires residents to license dogs, neither the Town of Superior nor unincorporated Boulder County have a licensing requirement”, that not all dog owners license their dogs even where it is required, and that “None of the communities of Louisville, Superior, and Boulder County require licenses for cats.” The second obstacle is that reporting after the fire ran through a Facebook group, and “Using it requires a Facebook account and the time and ability to post a report.”

The same kind of gap may exist where you are. If you have been trying to work out where your animal fits in some official count, there may not be an official count. That is a fact about record-keeping rather than about anything else.

What the Study Actually Documented

This is where most secondhand accounts of this paper go wrong, so here is the paper’s own material.

People were not at home, for ordinary reasons. The authors write: “As the Marshall Fire started on a weekday, and occurred between Christmas and the New Year, many residents were either working or traveling for the holidays.” The next sentence is the one that gets dropped, and it matters: “Many who were at home at the time managed to evacuate with their pets.” Read one more sentence, though, because the paper qualifies its own point later in the same section: “However, even those who were at home could not necessarily evacuate their animals in time.” Being home helped, and it did not settle anything. Being at work on a Thursday between the holidays was not a decision anybody made about their animal.

Getting back was physically prevented. The paper continues: “However, road closures, dense smoke, and fast-moving flames prevented those who were not at home from re-entering their neighborhoods to rescue their pets.” One interviewee’s drive home, the paper records, “which normally took 15-to-20-min, took nearly two hours that day.” He said: “I thought I’d have time to get home and get the cat, but nobody had access”. And: “Everything was shut down”.

The alert system had to be opted into, and many people did not know that. The paper states: “At 11:47 a.m., the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office issued the first mandatory evacuation orders through the landlines, cellphones, and email addresses of residents who had opted into the warning system.” Then: “After the fire, many residents said they did not know that they needed to opt into the emergency notification system to receive alerts on their cell phones.”

There is a figure attached to that finding, and it needs its own caveat carried with it, because the paper supplies one. The authors write: “Of the 24,289 emergency notifications sent out by the Boulder County Sheriff’s office during the Marshall fires, only 4637, or 19%, were confirmed as received.” Confirmed is doing specific work in that sentence, and the paper spells out what it means and what it does not: “To be marked as confirmed, recipients of the message needed to press 1 if they received a reverse 911 call or click on a link if they received a text or email. Countless people likely received these notifications but dismissed the instructions, so the exact number of messages received is impossible to know”. So that 19% is a confirmation rate, not a delivery rate, and the authors say outright that the delivery figure cannot be known. Anyone who quotes the number without that sentence is quoting it wrong.

An arrangement was in place and it failed anyway. One couple was driving back from another state. The paper records: “We figured we had done everything right,” she said, by leaving their two cats in the care of a trusted neighbor. The next sentence is the whole point: “Tragically, the neighbor’s home in Superior was among the first to go up in flames.”

A paid arrangement failed too. A Louisville owner who was away lost three dogs and a cat when the pet sitter left them behind. “He just got in the car and left,” she said. “He could’ve left the door open. He could have picked up our [small dog].” The paper adds that neighbors watched him leave but did not know the animals were in the house.

Cats could not be caught in the time available. One woman had noticed the wind and seen smoke in the distance but had not received an alert. She was putting out her recycling when a neighbor drove past, honked, and shouted at her to get out. The paper records what happened next: “The woman ran back into the house to get her three cats, but she could not get them into the carriers. She left the house, thinking she would be back later that day. When she tried to return, the road was blocked off.”

Even being present and organized was not always enough. Another interviewee had driven the family’s single car to check on a boarded horse, leaving her husband at home with two children, two dogs, two guinea pigs and a cat. Her husband got the children and the dogs out and a police patrol car got them clear. The guinea pigs had been picked up by her daughter and set down again while she got dressed, and they ran off. The cat was in the house and could not be found. The paper records her own assessment: “The woman said she felt sure that, had she been home at the time, she could have located the cat and gotten him out.”

Read those together and a pattern shows up that no list of three bullet points captures. Two of those households had made an arrangement for the animals. One had a car and had used it on an errand that was itself about an animal. One was outside her own house with the recycling bins. What did not vary across them was preparation. Where each person physically was mattered in some of these households and not in others, and the paper says as much itself: “However, even those who were at home could not necessarily evacuate their animals in time.” The recycling-bin owner was at her own home the whole time and still could not get her cats into the carriers. The fourth household’s husband was home too, with two dogs, two guinea pigs and a cat, and still lost the guinea pigs and could not find the cat. This page is not going to hand you a single variable that explains all four households, because the paper does not hand us one either.

The Three-Part Explanation That Gets Attributed to This Study

You will see this paper cited for a neat causal list: no plan, no transport, expected a short absence. The paper does not say that about the Marshall Fire.

Where that list comes from is the paper’s literature review, several pages earlier, where the authors are summarizing decades of earlier disaster research, most of it about other events. In that section they write: “Owners’ reasons for leaving pets behind at the time of evacuation often include thinking they would not be away from their homes for long.” The example they give immediately afterwards is a hazardous chemical spill studied by other researchers: “For example, in the chemical spill, emergency managers anticipated that the response would take several hours. Instead, it took over two weeks, reflecting the unpredictability of disaster response.” Then: “Other reasons include not having a disaster plan, which leaves owners not knowing where to take their pets and being unable to transport them.”

That is a summary of other people’s findings about other disasters, sitting in a section whose job is to describe the state of the literature before the new research starts. It is not what Irvine and Andre found in Boulder County, and their own findings, quoted above, look different: people at work, people out of town, blocked roads, dense smoke, an opt-in alert system, a sitter who left, cats who would not go into carriers.

We are drawing that distinction rather than passing over it because a citation that attaches somebody else’s conclusion to a study’s name is how a bad idea acquires a footnote. If you have been carrying the sentence “the research says people like me had no plan,” check which sentence of which paper that came from.

What the Paper Says About the Bond, and What It Does Not Say About You

The claim the paper set out to test is stated plainly in its abstract: “Although much of the literature on pets in disasters associates the failure to evacuate pets with a weak or absent human-animal bond, rapid-onset disasters challenge the foundations of that claim.”

Its conclusion, in full, reads: “Although the literature has tended to associate the failure to evacuate pets with a weak human-animal bond, the circumstances surrounding the spread of The Marshall Fire suggest that other factors need to be considered.” The authors go on: “In particular, researchers may have over attributed the role of the human-animal bond in their analyses, especially when examining decisions to leave animals behind, and failed to account for the contextual dynamics of the event.” And: “The Marshall Fire’s intensity and behavior, coupled with pitfalls in the emergency notification system, rather than lack of care for or attachment to animals, resulted in high pet fatalities.”

The sentence most often lifted from this paper is this one: “In the Marshall Fire, as in Hurricane Katrina and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, factors well beyond the control of pet owners prevented many from saving their animals.” The sentences that follow it are the ones that keep it honest, and they scope it tightly to that event: “In its rapid onset in a highly populated area, the Marshall Fire was an unprecedented event in Colorado. Densely populated neighborhoods are not typically vulnerable to wildfire, but the Marshall Fire showed how quickly a wildfire can become an urban firestorm.”

Here is the boundary this page will not cross. Those are findings about a documented set of circumstances in Boulder County in December 2021, published by two named researchers who describe what they measured. They are not a statement about your evacuation, which we know nothing about, and we are not going to convert somebody else’s research into a reassurance addressed to you. What the study gives you is narrower and more solid than a reassurance: evidence that the explanation you may have heard, the one about attachment, was examined by researchers in at least one disaster and was not what they found.

The limits, in the authors’ own words

The paper states them itself, and any honest use of it has to carry them.

On sample size: “The small size of the sample of interviewees constitutes a second limitation. In most research, only tentative conclusions can be drawn from a sample size of eight people.” The authors immediately explain why they proceeded anyway, and that half belongs here too: “However, qualitative studies usually employ purposive samples (rather than probability samples), which provide information-rich sources.” They report that the interviews reached what qualitative researchers call saturation on the central question: “In this study’s interviews, all eight pet owners discussed the inability to return home, either because of absence from the area or emergency closures. All eight discussed pitfalls with emergency notifications.”

On who was interviewed: “Of the eight owners who responded, all but one were female. All were white, consistent with the majority of the population within the affected communities.” Participants were recruited through the community Facebook group, which means they were people who found and used that group.

On what was left out: the authors write that the analysis “does not include the fire’s impact on horses and livestock”, nor fish who died when homes lost power, nor most small animals, and that “the estimates of animal deaths reported here would be higher if records of other species were available.”

One fire. Eight households. A self-selected sample recruited from a Facebook group. That is what this paper’s own fieldwork amounts to, and a page that told you it amounted to more would be lying to you about the one thing you came here to check. It is not the whole published literature on the question, though. The same paper’s review of earlier disasters reports other researchers reaching the same conclusion about attachment: of the roughly 200,000 pets left behind in Hurricane Katrina, “It is unlikely that this number can be attributed to a weak human-animal bond,” and of pet owners in the Fukushima disaster, “owners’ decisions regarding their animals at the time of the disaster do not stem from a weak bond.” We have not read those underlying studies ourselves, so we are reporting them the way this paper reports them, not independently verifying them.

What the Paper Recorded About the Grief Itself

Three findings, reported as findings.

The authors write: “All interviewees expressed feelings of sadness, depression, helplessness, anger, and guilt related to the inability to save their pets.” Those are the words the researchers used to describe what eight people told them in interviews two weeks after a fire. They are a record of what was said, not a description of any condition and not a description of you.

The paper then records something specific about how those people were treated afterwards: “Moreover, their grief was often “disenfranchised,” or underestimated and unrecognized in the context of the overall tragedy and all that recovering from a disaster requires”. The term is one the authors take from a separate 2022 study, which they cite. The practical shape of it is that when a thousand houses burn down, an animal can get filed under property by the people around a household, including people who mean well, and the paper reports that happening to its interviewees. That pattern is documented in a peer-reviewed journal, which is worth knowing if the reaction around you has not looked like the reaction to a death.

And one interviewee’s account is recorded in a way that answers a question people often will not ask out loud. Of the owner whose pet sitter left, the paper says: “She emphasized how traumatic the loss was for her 14-year-old daughter, who had begun therapy as a consequence.” Later, in the discussion, the authors repeat it: “One interviewee told us her teenage daughter had already begun therapy to cope with the trauma.” People in this exact situation arranged professional help, within weeks, and the researchers recorded it without comment or qualification. You can do the same, at any point, and you do not need to have reached any particular threshold first.

That same owner said something else the paper prints in full, and it is the plainest sentence in the study: “Despite losing everything,” she said, “it’s the pets we grieve”.

The community response the paper documented

The authors record what happened around the grief as well as inside it. “Following the Marshall Fire, pet owners coped with their grief privately in various ways.” Then: “In January, the Humane Society of Boulder Valley and a Boulder church held vigils for lost pets.” At the time the paper was written, a Louisville non-profit was raising funds for a public art installation in memory of the animals who died. The authors’ assessment of those events is quoted here as theirs: “Efforts such as these recognize and validate the grief felt by pet owners and provide valuable social support by allowing them to mourn openly.”

That is a description of what a community did after one fire. It is not an instruction, and this page is not going to hand you a ritual to perform.

The veterinary clinics were not neutral parties either

If the practice that treated your animal has been hard to deal with, or unexpectedly emotional, or simply slow, the paper documents why that can happen after a disaster. It reports that veterinary clinics in the burn zone came through with few physical losses but that staff members had losses of their own, including damage to their homes and to the neighborhoods around the clinic, the loss of patients, and the grief of their clients, and that most clinics were already operating at or beyond capacity before the fire. It also records what was brought in for them: “In the immediate weeks after Marshall Fire, Colorado State University’s Argus Center and local pet loss support resources provided mental health support to area clinics and shelters.”

Grief Support That Is Not Crisis Support

Everything in this section sits below the 24-hour block at the top of this page on purpose. These are limited-hours, volunteer-staffed pet-loss lines. They are not crisis lines and the institutions running them say so.

Cornell states it directly: “The Cornell Pet Loss Support Hotline is not a mental health hotline. If the concerns voiced over a call are beyond topics related to pet loss and pet grieving, volunteers will help you find appropriate resources for your needs.” Cornell’s own resource page lists the “988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988” and states: “If at any point you are experiencing a mental health crisis and/or feel like harming yourself or someone else, please call 911 or your local emergency service.” That is Cornell’s instruction, quoted from Cornell, and it is the correct one. Worth noting alongside it, and it is the reason the section further down exists: an earlier passage on that same Cornell page still sends readers to the Lifeline’s pre-988 ten-digit number rather than to 988. The routes printed on this page are 988, 1-800-985-5990 and 838255.

Each entry below was read on the operating institution’s own website on August 11, 2026. Nothing here is copied from an aggregated list.

Cornell Pet Loss Support Hotline, 607-218-7457. Cornell’s page states the hotline “is staffed by volunteer veterinary students who have undergone extensive training with professional grief counselors.” On hours it publishes no schedule at all, and says why: “The Pet Loss Support Hotline’s hours vary seasonally. Please call the hotline for current hours.” It adds: “Please check back frequently as our hours may change depending on volunteer availability.” On anonymity, the page notes that the call is answered through Google Voice, which “will prompt you to enter your name before connecting”, and that “To remain anonymous, you can say “anonymous” or just enter your first name.” If you find a page anywhere quoting fixed Cornell hours, it is quoting something Cornell does not currently publish.

Tufts Pet Loss Support Helpline, 508-839-7966. The Cummings School’s own page states: “The helpline is staffed from 6 pm to 9 pm Monday through Thursday EST and has 24-hour voicemail. Calls left on the voicemail will be returned at the next scheduled shift.”

That Tufts page also carries a section written for a situation almost nobody else addresses, headed “But suppose my pet didn’t die…”. It states: “The Pet Loss Support Helpline is available not only for people facing decisions regarding euthanasia and death of their pet. Any situation where you find yourself separated from your pet can be a devastating one.” It lists the questions it says callers are left with, and one of them is “Did I do the right thing?” If your animal’s fate is unresolved rather than confirmed, that page says in writing that the line is for you too.

CVMA Pet Loss Helpline, (630) 325-1600. The Chicago Veterinary Medical Association’s page describes how this one works, and the mechanism is different from the others: “Helpline is a free service for grieving pet owners. Trained volunteers retrieve messages from the grieving and then call to offer support by active listening as well as providing printed materials and referrals when needed.” So expect to leave a message and receive a call back rather than to reach a person immediately. The same association publishes a free support group called Wings, and states that it “hosts a Zoom Meeting on the first Wednesday of every month from 7:30-9:00 pm”, with an email address on that page for the invitation. The same page states that the request has to be sent by 6:00 pm on the same night as the meeting, so it is not something you can join by turning up at the start time.

Why every number on this page carries a date

Here is the documented reason to distrust any undated pet-loss hotline list, including a list on a university website.

The University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine published a notice, dated July 9, 2018, titled “CARE Helpline Has Closed”. It reads: “The CARE Helpline is no longer in operation. The University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine no longer offers a grief telephone support service.”

On August 11, 2026, the Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine’s veterinary social work pet loss resources page still listed, under the heading Hotlines, the “University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine Companion Animal Related Emotions (CARE) Helpline” with its old number. The same list names the 988 Lifeline by its former name and its old ten-digit number rather than by 988.

That is not a criticism of anybody. Resource lists decay quietly, and a page maintained by a veterinary social work team is about as good a source as this genre has. It is the reason this page prints a date beside every number and tells you to confirm before you rely on it, including on the numbers above.

Several other veterinary schools appear on aggregated lists as running pet-loss lines. We tried to reach current pages for several of them on August 11, 2026 and the addresses we tried returned 403 or 404 errors. That means we could not confirm them on the day of writing, which is why they are not listed here. It does not mean those services do not exist, and if one is local to you it is worth searching that school’s own site directly.

The Questions That Belong Somewhere Else

People arrive at this page carrying several different questions at once. Most of them have concrete answers, and none of those answers lives here.

If you do not know whether the animal died. A great many of these situations are unresolved rather than settled, and unresolved is its own kind of hard. The systems where found animals actually surface are covered step by step on our page on finding a lost pet after a disaster, which starts with animal control and the microchip registry rather than with social media. If an animal has already been picked up and you need it back, proving a pet is yours and reclaiming it covers what agencies ask for.

If the animal may still be inside a closed area. Do not drive at a checkpoint. There are published channels for this, and re-entry access to reach a pet in a closed zone covers which kind of restricted area you are dealing with and which channel matches it, while how to request a pet welfare check or rescue covers which agency takes the request and what makes it actionable.

If you are worried about the legal question. That is a real question with a real answer, and it is not this page’s. Is it illegal to leave your pet behind during an evacuation quotes five states’ statutes as those legislatures publish them, and is explicit that it draws no conclusion about any individual. It also says something worth repeating here: the record of what happened is at its most accurate right now.

If the animal has died and there are decisions in front of you. What to do if your pet dies in a disaster covers custody of the body, local burial rules, cremation, and the one situation that must be settled before anything irreversible happens.

If you are asking why the shelter would not take your animal. Do pet-friendly disaster shelters exist covers what the PETS Act actually says, why general-population shelters usually cannot house pets, and what counties run instead. That page explains the system that leaves people in this position. This one is written for the person who was already left in it.

If an animal did come back and is not behaving like itself. Pet behavior changes after a disaster covers housetraining regression, clinginess, hiding and noise fear after an evacuation, what the first weeks tend to look like, and the point at which to call a veterinarian.

The rest of the library sits on our pet emergency playbooks hub.

The Shape of the Evidence, Stated Plainly

It is worth being explicit about this, because the gaps are large and the internet fills them with confident writing.

The study above is one peer-reviewed paper about owners whose pets died in a rapid-onset urban firestorm, and it interviewed eight people. It reports what those eight said. It does not follow them over time, it does not compare them to anyone, and it makes no prediction about any individual. Nothing quoted on this page gives a timeline for this, a set of stages, a threshold at which a person should seek professional help, or a procedure for handling it at home. This page is not going to invent any of the four, and a page that hands you one has invented it.

What is published, and what this page has therefore given you, is narrow and checkable: what the circumstances were in one documented disaster, what the researchers concluded about the explanation that blames attachment, which phone lines are open right now and what their operators say about them, and which of your other questions have real answers on pages that own them.

If you want more than that, the thing that exists is a person. A licensed mental health professional can do what a web page structurally cannot, and arranging that is a reasonable step at any point, including before you are sure you need it.

Talk to Someone Now

These three lines are open 24 hours a day, every day. Every number and every phrase below was read on that organization’s own website on August 11, 2026.

Disaster Distress Helpline. SAMHSA’s page for this line, marked Last Updated 09/26/2025, says: “Call or text 1-800-985-5990.” In Spanish, the same page says: “Llama o envía un mensaje de texto 1-800-985-5990 presiona “2.”” For Deaf and Hard of Hearing ASL callers it says: “Please text or call the Disaster Distress Helpline at 1-800-985-5990 using your preferred Relay provider.” SAMHSA describes the service as “available 24/7 to all residents in the U.S. and its territories who are experiencing emotional distress related to natural or human-caused disasters” and states: “There is no need to give any identifying information when you contact DDH.” Read the next sentence too, so a question at the end of the call does not surprise you: “The counselor may ask you for some basic information at the end of the call, but these questions are optional and intended to help SAMHSA keep track of the types of calls it receives.”

988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call 988, text 988, or chat online at 988lifeline.org. Its site states: “The 988 Lifeline is available 24/7/365. Your conversations are free and confidential.” Its Deaf, Hard of Hearing and Hearing Loss page states that you can reach 988 Videophone by calling 988 with a VP number, that you can “Send any message to 988 to start a text conversation”, and, for TTY users: “Use your preferred relay service or dial 711 then 988.” A Spanish-language site runs at 988lifeline.org/es/, and states: “La línea 988 está disponible 24/7/365. Sus conversaciones son gratuitas y confidenciales.”

Veterans Crisis Line. Its site publishes “Dial 988 then Press 1”, “Text 838255”, and a chat option, describes itself as “24/7, confidential crisis support for Veterans and their loved ones”, and states: “You don’t have to be enrolled in VA benefits or health care to connect.”

Talking to a licensed mental health professional about this is a reasonable next step, and it is one you can take at any point, including now.

If what you need is practical disaster help rather than counseling, SAMHSA’s Disaster Distress Helpline page also directs readers to “Call 211 for information about disaster-related evacuations, shelters, food and clothing distribution, volunteer opportunities, and other resources and referrals. Or visit the national 211 Call Center website to find the 211 information and referral center nearest you.”