Crisis Text Line releases trends and data

Crisis Text Line is a service that troubled teens can use to find help with suicidal thoughts, depression, anxiety, and other issues via text messaging. The long-term hope was to anonymize and encode these text messages so that researchers and policy-makers could better understand something typically kept private to the individuals.

Following through, the organization recently released a look into their data and a sample of encoded messages. (There’s a link to download the data at the bottom of the page.)

The visual part of the release shows when text messages typically come in, and you can subset by issue, state, and days. It could use some work, but it’s a good start. Hopefully they keep working on it and release more data as the set grows. It could potentially do a lot of good.