Quantitative analysis of crisis hotlines’ audience and how can DarkWire save lives.
During the last call with our mentor from the AngelHack accelerator program a new potential target audience for our app has emerged — Crisis Hotline callers. We can provide hotline clients with two additional ways to execute a call. Call the hotline using DarkWire app. Or dial an alternate number, listed on the hotline’s website, that will be routed through our anonymising service.
Such a partnership can be extremely beneficial for us and hotlines for a variety of reasons. For us one of the benefits is that such a partnership doesn’t require any extra expenditures for PR campaign – we can contact hotline’s managers directly and make a deal with them and this will bring us the steady flow of clients at no cost. Also the hotlines are constantly growing and this growth will bring us new clients at no cost as well. And by integrating our software into their workflow the hotlines can attract many new users that require help, but were to scared to call before. Partnership between ACKbit Inc (DarkWire) and various crisis hotlines can save thousands of lives. Now lets look at it at this statement in bigger detail.
We fist decided to make sure whether we have competitors in this market or not. It turned out that not a single hotline (at least in US) provides its users with the features we offer. Then we decided to make sure that there was a real need in our services – we went to the official reports of crisis hotlines. It was relatively hard to find any data that would be interesting for us, but we managed to find some at PEC-journal. According to the data presented by the reports the users are more or less satisfied with the services of the hotlines – on average users on a scale from 1 to 10 claimed to feel better on a 7 after calling the hotline. This wasn’t quite what we were looking for – we were trying to identify if many people decide not to call crisis hotline because they feel insecure. So we decided to look for the discussions of hotlines and found one of them on youtube. Here are only couple of reviews that we found under a youtube video in which blogger was talking about crisis hotlines. We chose the ones that are describing the problem best, but there are many more of similar reviews and comments on the internet.
“I think that I dont want to risk cops at my door or them tracking my call. So no.”
“i agree with some of these comments. call the suicide hotline you will be calling the police as well. after i called suicide hotline a few hours later the cops showed up and my parents judged the hell out of me. therapist , suicide interns , mental hospitals and cops work together to cause more emotional, mental and physical pain”
“see… i was gonna call or text a suicide hotline but now since ive read all these comment about them being unqualifed or calling the police i rather just not.”
We understand that sometimes hotlines are obligated to report cases of suicidal behaviour or sometimes they want police to come in and check if you are alright, but as we can see from the reviews above, this can be very harmful for many people. Even though the police at their door might save their life, such situations scare away many people who need help. But for many people such approach only hearts them more and they see this intervention as personal assault as we can see from this quote “therapist , suicide interns , mental hospitals and cops work together to cause more emotional, mental and physical pain”. Is that really what we want people to think of crisis hotlines? We need to make crisis hotlines a safe place. A place where you can say anything that hearts you without being worried that in an hour cops will knock at your door. A place where no one can tell you that they will “track your call”. This is one of the reasons our services are so important for crisis hotlines. By substituting people’s voice with a robotic voice, we give people some extra confidence to speak and by making a call through DarkWire we can guarantee the users that no one will tell them that they will “track your call” unless the user wants it (this happens sometimes too).
So lets have a look at some sad data. It is sad, because according to usatoday article “The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline saw calls double from 2014 to 2017, an increase that coincides with rising suicide rates in the USA.” In 2017 The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline ansered 2 million calls. This is only data from US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, not from all of the existing hotlines and there are hundreds of them in US and tens of thousands around the world.
Unfortunately it was very hard to collect data about crisis hotlines work because of their privacy policies, not willingness of users to participate in questionaries etc. and also much of the data collected was irrelevant to us. So we decided to collect some general data in which we have the most interest in deferent spheres that are connected to crisis hotlines. This topics include: suicide-related; sexual violence; substance abuse and domestic violence.
Suicidal issues. According to SpeakUp.US, there were 44,193 reported suicide deaths in the U.S in 2015 and on every suicide there are 25 attempts, which means that approximately 1,105,000 Americans make a suicide attempt every year – and this is only the registered data of attempts made so who knows how many more people wanted to commit a suicide? The numbers are enormous; we were shocked when we discovered them. Our approximate number of people who have very serious “suicidal issues” is over 2.5–3 million and as we can see on the graph below the number is growing. This is our estimate, while the estimate of SpeakUp.US is that 25 Million Americans suffer from depression each ear. And all of them require help to recover from depression and to avoid suicide. Taking the data about the calls from the usatoday, we see that in 2017 The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline answered 2 million calls. Since it only represents the number of calls the major national hotline got, we add about 0.5 million calls annually and get total of 2.5 million calls to crisis line made annually by people with “suicidal issues”, which is only 10% of people who have “suicidal issues”.
Victims of sexual violence. According to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), “On average, there are 321,500 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States.” And 1 of every 6 American women had been sexually assaulted throughout her life. RAINN gets about 16,000 calls each month which is approximately 200,000 calls a year. This represents that according to official data in about 62% of all reported cases of sexual violence the victims call the crisis line.
Substance abuse. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, an estimated 15.1 million people aged 12 or older had an alcohol use disorder in 2016 and an estimated 7.4 million people aged 12 or older
had an illicit drug use disorder. This means that over 23.4 million people suffer from substance abuse. We spent plenty of time trying to find the statistics of how many calls do substance abuse hotlines get annually, but couldn’t find anything on reliable resources. For this reason we will make an estimate based on other categories – domestic violence and suicidal statistics since we believe this two categories best represent the overall situation in this field. We want to note that for this calculation the official data is used and we don’t take into the account the number of unregistered cases. So our estimate number of calls made to the substance abuse hotlines equals total number of people in these two categories who called the hotline/(total number of domestic violence victims + people suffering from “suicidal issues”)(2.5+7.2)/(25+10)=28%. So, based on official data of other spheres, approximately 28% of people suffering from substance should call the crisis hotline, which equals to 23.4x0.28 = 6.55 million calls received by substance abuse hotlines annually.
Domestic violence. According to National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), more then 10 million people experience intimate partner physical violence in US annually. According to NCDSV, “On a typical day, domestic violence hotlines nationwide receive over 20,000 calls.” Which means that domestic violence hotlines receive about 7.2 million calls annually. This means that in about 72% of registered domestic violence cases victims call the crisis hotline.
To find the number of officially registered cases, we should sum everything up: number of people with suicidal issues + number of people who experienced sexual violence + number of people who have issues with substance abuse + number of people who experienced domestic violence= 25 + 0.321 + 23.4 + 10 = 58.721(million). Which means that according to official data at least 58.721 million people have very serious issues and need help. We want to note that this data is an underestimate and only roughly shows us the real situation, since enormous number of cases go unreported, hence unregistered.
“Enormous number of cases” sounds vague, doesn’t it? We decided to clarify this “enormous number” and find out how many cases go unreported. According to brandongaille, “About 50% of stalking victims will say something is happening to them or report the incident to police. As for other forms of abuse, it is believed that only 25% of physical assaults are ever reported and only 1 out of every 5 rapes is ever reported to police.” Unfortunately, we were unable to find any reliable estimates of the number of unreported substance abuse cases, but we believe that it is slightly lower then stalking victims reports. We believe that it can be around 35%.
To count the real number of people with “serious issues” we multiply the official data by the estimate number of unreported cases and get: 25 + 0.321x5 + 23.4x1.35 + 10x4 = 98.195 (million). We should take into the account that this is the high estimate, since many of this sections (suicidal issues, domestic violence, substance abuse and sexual vilence) can intersect. This introduces additional error in our estimate, which unfortunately we can’t improve yet. But with this data we can make a statement that at least 50 million Americans need help of crisis hotlines and at most 100 million Americans need this help. For our following estimate, we will take the average of this two numbers and say that it equals to 75 million people.
Now let’s see how many calls crisis hotlines (the ones that are included in our research) get annually. To do this we will sum up data from the following sections: Domestic violence + Substance abuse + Victims of sexual assault + Suicide issues and we get the following numbers: 7.2 + 6.55 + 0.2 + 2.5 = 16.45 (million). The total number of calls received by the crisis hotlines annually is 16.45 million.
It is time to assemble all pieces of data and drive the conclusion. From roughly 75 million people experiencing serious troubles, only 16.45 call the crisis hotline – this is less then 22%. Why is the number so low? There are many reasons, but one of them is shame. The shame that people feel when telling very personal information – this is why only 1 of every 5 cases of rapes are ever reported to police. This is why only 10% of people with serious suicidal thoughts call the hotline. People are scared of the consequences their words might have and many prefer to be silent.
This is when DarkWire comes into play. We let people hide their voice and add extra layers to their anonymity. By preserving our customer’s identity, we give them confidence and confidence can save their life. We hope that our services might increase the number of reported cases, decrease the growing number of suicides and help people find their way through problems they face.
We believe that by integrating our software into the workflow of crisis hotlines we can increase the number of calls they receive by at least 5% and this means millions more calls and thousands of saved lives. Currently we are reaching out to several relatively small crisis hotlines to try integrating our application in their hotline and see the results.
We keep researching this topic trying to identify the major problems that users of crisis hotlines meet. For this purpose we will have an interview with one of the caunsellors of National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and with one or two victims of sexual violence. We will ask them several questions that will help us better understand the users of crisis hotlines and prove that shame plays a crucial role here.
We will post this interviews in our next article on Medium, so subscribe, leave your feedback and stay updated on our progress.
