Beyond Diagnosis: Representing the Hotline in The Slender Thread.

This article analyzes the 1965 film *The Slender Thread* as a cultural text that reflects midcentury tensions around psychiatric care, race, and gender through its depiction of an early American suicide hotline. The film dramatizes the hotline's ambiguous position between radical, anonymous peer care and state-backed psychiatric and carceral intervention, embodied by Sidney Poitier's Black volunteer who rescues a white woman caller, symbolizing racialized dynamics of care and control known as the "Poitier Effect." It situates the telephone as both a site of moral panic and a technological mediator that enables a form of care simultaneously intimate and distanced, while revealing the hotline's entanglement with institutional power despite its appearance as a novel, nonjudgmental service. The film's narrative and production choices highlight the era's anxieties about mental health treatment, the family, and interracial relations, ultimately portraying the hotline as a conduit that channels radical care back into conservative social and state structures.