Crisis Text Line
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| Founded | 2013 |
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| Founder | Nancy Lublin |
| Founded at | New York, NY |
| Purpose | Crisis intervention |
| Headquarters | New York City, United States |
Crisis Text Line is a United States not-for-profit organization providing free crisis intervention via SMS message. The organization's services are available 24 hours a day every day, throughout the US by texting 741741.
As of December 30, 2016, Crisis Text Line has processed 28,155,475 text messages.
The text line is notable among hotlines for its triage system, in which conversations are assessed by an algorithm for severity and queued accordingly.
Crisis Text Line was conceptualized as a result of Do Something's mobile interactions with its members. Do Something CEO Nancy Lublin states that as members increasingly sent deeply personal text messages, she saw a need for a separate channel for these messages in order to better assist the young people sending them. In public appearances, Lublin specifically cites a series of texts reading "He won't stop raping me... It's my dad." as an impetus for creating Crisis Text Line.
The service was given a quiet launch in August 2013 through a text message to Do Something members in Chicago and El Paso, and was soon being used by texters in every United States area code. Today, 350 people text the service daily, most of whom discovered the service through word-of-mouth.
In July 2015, it was announced that Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile would be waiving fees for use of the service, and that texts to Crisis Text Line would not appear on billing records. Publicity for the move, including a high-profile blog post by Richard Branson, prompted AT&T to follow suit.
In September 2015, Crisis Text Line announced via the Do Something blog that it would be taking steps to become a resource for people who are Deaf or hard of hearing. A text message to the service reading, "I can't call suicide hotlines because I can't hear, so I was hoping I could use this service" was mentioned as an inspiration for this announcement. Specifically, the blog post mentioned accessible training for Crisis Counselors, and creating education around working with Deaf texters.
Chief Data Scientist Bob Filbin was highlighted in The Chronicle of Philanthropy as one of their 40 Under 40 for his work using data to inform Crisis Text Line's efforts. Speaking about the difference between Crisis Text Line's corpus and other mental health data, he said, "This is people in their greatest moment of crisis. Most of the other data on mental health and crisis is survey data, which is collected after the fact. It’s people remembering."
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