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Teen Support
A new initiative from Crisis Text Line crunches the numbers
On the night of August 11, as fans around the world began to mourn Robin Williams’s death, a trend was emerging at Crisis Text Line, the country’s largest crisis hotline for teens. Starting around 9 p.m. EST, the volume of conversations skyrocketed. Over the next 24 hours, trained specialists responded to a record number of teens across the country struggling with feelings of depression and suicide. The spike lasted for three days.
Teens are particularly susceptible to a phenomenon known as “copycat suicides”: When media coverage of a suicide increases, so does the chance people will emulate the suicide. Celebrity suicides create the greatest risk.
A study by Wayne State University found that celebrity suicides were 14 times more likely to have copycat suicides than those of other people.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), since people who are thinking about suicide feel alone and helpless, open communication is often the first step away from a crisis. We built Crisis Text Line to connect teens to one-on-one support during their most vulnerable moments, especially when they feel like they have no one else to turn to.
Launched in August 2013, the service offers free, 24/7 text support to teens nationwide. Teens have already exchanged over 3 million messages with trained specialists about issues ranging from relationship problems to isolation and substance abuse. Often, teens who text Crisis Text Line are using a crisis service for the first time. Many who have used other services say they prefer text to chat. This means Crisis Text Line is uniquely positioned to help teens who might not access another form of care.
It also means Crisis Text Line has an unprecedented chance to spot trends in the struggles teens are experiencing as they happen.
That’s why, on August 18, we launched Crisis Trends, which aims to empower journalists, researchers, and citizens to understand the crises American teens face, including thoughts of suicide.
Crisis Trends shows near realtime data that we hope will help organizations with limited resources decide where to focus.
- As Crisis Trends shows, for a national suicide prevention service looking for a U.S. state in which to bolster services, they should consider Montana.
- For a local crisis center evaluating what days of the week to offer services, they should carefully assess Sundays.
- For a teen suicide hotline considering whether to be open during standard business hours or after school, they should reconsider: The peak times for teens thinking about suicide accessing Crisis Text Line are 5-8 a.m., 10 a.m.-1 p.m., and 6-9 p.m.
All of this data is available on Crisis Trends. We hope Crisis Trends will allow crisis services and policy makers with limited resources to make every dollar count.
This data matters for the public, too. According to NAMI, an estimated 80 percent of all those who commit suicide give some warning of their intentions or mention their feelings to a friend or family member. Crisis Trends aims to shed light on what may be the toughest times for a teen struggling with thoughts of suicide and when they may be in most need of someone to listen, or to know someone is there.
In the 24 hours after Robin Williams’s death, media poured out to cover the story, some of which may have inadvertently encouraged copycat suicides. Yet many articles explicitly warned of copycat suicides and offered advice on how to prevent them. Copycat suicide is a data trend that’s gained traction. What other trends can we uncover and use to prevent future crises? Crisis Trends aims to be at the forefront of that effort, offering the tools for a more data-driven discussion on how to best help teens in crisis and prevent future ones from happening.
