Crisis_Text_Line

High-Level: Our data is showing a first wave of mental health effects from COVID-19: anxiety mirroring where the virus is showing up. We're expecting the second wave will be impact of the quarantines--child abuse, substance abuse, domestic violence, etc, as people may be trapped at home with abusers and away from self care routines.

Some specific patterns:

(1) Our texters are skewing older than we normally see (53% 18 - 34 year olds, up from 42% normally); we’re also seeing higher rates of LGBTQ+ texters (51%, up from 45% normally), and low-income texters (55%, up from 50% normally).

(2) School closings, financial issues, and social media issues are trending co-occuring issues.

(3) 77% (!) of all texters are experiencing stress or anxiety related to coronavirus. For this group, our quality rating is 90% (three points higher than our overall average).

(BF)

Thanks so much for checking in with us! We encourage our Crisis Counselors to practice self-care during and after their shifts. Some practices we have in place for them is helpguide.org and Dartmouth Relaxation Downloads (https://bit.ly/DRD_ref). We also have a supervisor/coach to oversee so they know they're not alone in this. They're also able to get community support through our network of other Crisis Counselors! (SM)

Those of us working directly on the Platform often get asked, “How can you do this type of work?” and what we rarely get asked is “WHY do you do this work?” Our team of supervisors and Platform Operations Managers do this work because of the pure magic that we witness 24/7/365: People who reach out in crisis, all sorts of crisis, chat with our non-judgemental, empathetic Crisis Counselors, and they feel better. They feel heard. They feel supported. “Simply” because we listen and we care. The work we do every day is extraordinary. (FM)

Crisis Text Line is taking steps to establish a global resource for people in Crisis. Our first step was to start expanding to other English-speaking countries. We're currently live in the UK, Ireland, and Canada. Next, we're starting to look at expanding into Spanish. Once we've established a successful model for expanding into new languages, we hope to continue to expand to cover countries including South Korea and Japan. So, know that we're on it! The main thing holding us back from expanding faster is the main thing holding back high impact non-profits; funding! If you happen to know anyone who can support our expansion, we're excited to chat :) -BF

We've had ~5500 Crisis Counselors (CCs) active in the last 28 days, and almost 30K trained. Yes, we've seen a recent influx - 5000 CC applications have been started in the last month, with half of that (2500) in the last week alone! (FM)