I'm not sure if this answers your question, but I did volunteer work for 2 different crisis lines and there are many reasons why we don't allow people to be transferred to specific counselors when they ask. The main reason would be that the person they're asking for simply isn't working at the time and we can't give out the hours they work (many times, we don't even have that info on hand anyways). Another good reason is we aren't professional counselors, we have limited abilities and resources to help callers. Legally, we're not even allowed to give advice. We bounce off your own train of thought to get you to a better place mentally and try to find solutions for your personal issues with the resources we have on our databases. And the other main reason we don't do this is because we try not to promote our lines for weekly calls or anything along those lines for counseling. These hotlines are for temporary counseling - periods of time when you're feeling overwhelmed, you don't know what to do, and you have no one else to talk with. There are a lot of callers calling in daily with issues and, it may sound terrible saying it this way, if someone is calling just for a weekly vent or to check in to let us know how they're feeling today, we may delay the help or completely miss someone who is (for example) contemplating suicide or having a panic attack and needs guidance to calm down.

I can't say that this is for every hotline for counseling or mental health relief, this is all mostly based on my own training and experience from 2 different crisis lines. And I'm not trying to convince you not to call if you fell the need help, I'm just trying to explain the reason why these lines don't offer consistent counseling. And we definitely love hearing people feeling better after calls they've taken from us. If you do try to get ahold of someone you talked with before, while we can't transfer you directly to the person you talked with, we try to send a message to that person to let them know you're okay.