Paul Calvert spoke with David Koren, the Executive Director from ERAN.

David: Poverty is one of the things that makes life harder, but to make the connection between poverty and suicide attempts is very dangerous. What we can see, is that where someone has lost his job, or his financial situation has changed and gone down dramatically, then that is a dangerous time. However, if you compare poor people with middle class people, then poor people don't commit suicide more.

Paul: Do you have branches all around the country?

David: Yes. We are from Be'er Sheva in the South, all the way to Kiryat Shmona in the North, but when people call, they get a response from whoever is free at the time. It doesn't really matter where the people are who are answering, the people get the same service. We have 12 different places to be able to gather enough volunteers from each community and volunteers won't travel from one city to another to do his shift.

Paul: What languages are people calling you in?

David: Mainly Hebrew, but our services are also in Arabic, Russian and English, but in English depends on whether the volunteer can carry the conversation in English. If they can't then we can call back to the person who needs the English support, but mainly it is Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. It's also on the internet on the chat, emails and forum, which is three ways of helping people over the internet.

Paul: So what happens when someone contacts you?

David: There are all kinds of scenarios. A person can call us and say, "I want to share with you an issue with the family", or, "I had a bad day", or people that are lonely. There are a lot of lonely people that want to talk to someone and there is no-one they can talk to. Every call gets personal care and every call is reviewed afterwards by a supervisor within our framework and the volunteer gets feedback.

Paul: Are you Government funded, or are you a charity?

David: We are a charity. We get very little support from the Government. About three percent of our budget comes from the Government and 95 percent is from people who donate to us; charity foundations, the business sector from the country and from outside the country. It's very hard to get donors to support us and we are trying to think how we can extend our donations, because we are short of 500 volunteers that we need in at least two different places. We don't have these because of a lack of funding.

Paul: Facebook gave you a big accolade, what was that?

David: Facebook realised that when someone is on Facebook expressing suicidal thoughts, then Facebook has a way of advising people to call us. This is the agreement we have with Facebook, but the responsibility to approach us is on the person himself.

Paul: How many calls a year do you get?

David: The other year we had a little bit over 160,000. If he had more volunteers we would get another 100,000 for sure. There are times that we are not able to respond to all the callers, mainly at night.

Paul: Do you see the suicide rate go up or down during times of conflict, like recently with Gaza?