CANANDAIGUA, N.Y.  Melanie Poorman swiveled in her chair and punched a button on the phone. The caller, an Iraq war veteran in his 30s, had recently broken up with his girlfriend and was watching a movie, “Body of War,” that was triggering bad memories. He started to cry.

And he had a 12-gauge shotgun nearby. Could someone please come and take it away, he asked.

Ms. Poorman, 54, gently coaxed the man into unloading the weapon. As a co-worker called the police, she stayed on the line, talking to him about his girlfriend, his work, the war. Suddenly, there were sirens. “I unloaded the gun!” she heard him shout. And then he hung up. (He was taken to a hospital, she learned later.)

Ms. Poorman sat back and took a deep breath. “That was an easy one,” she said. The hard ones are “angry, angry, angry  they have intent, they have a plan, and they have no desire for help,” she said. But they call anyway.

“I think contact is important, even at the end of life,” she said.

It was just an average night at the Department of Veterans Affairs suicide prevention hot line in central New York. Over here, Rebecca talked to a drunken man who was seeing people he had killed. Over there, Katie was on the line with a bipolar man having nightmares. Across the room, Virginia tried to calm a man who had refused to take his medication and was threatening to run headlong into traffic.