Ohio promotes Crisis Text Line to help reduce state suicide rates

“He won’t stop raping me. It’s my dad. He told me not to tell anyone. Are you there?”

This was the text message DoSomething.Org’s former CEO Nancy Lublin cites as “the worst text” they had ever received at the nonprofit, and the message that sparked the idea for Crisis Text Line in 2013.

The Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services recently unveiled a $2 million suicide prevention initiative, which includes the adoption and promotion of Crisis Text Line, a national hotline.

Crisis Text Line from Samantha Ickes on Vimeo.

Crisis Text Line is a non-profit organization, which enables anyone to reach out to a “crisis counselor” via text message during a time of distress. Lublin left her position as CEO of DoSomething.org to become the CEO of Crisis Text Line once she realized the strength of the service.

Since 2013, Crisis Text Line has exchanged over 24 million messages with anonymous people from every area code in the U.S. Unlike call lines like The Trevor Project or the National Suicide Prevention hotline, Crisis Text Line has no specificifications for the types of problems its users are coping with. In Ohio, some of the most commonly discussed topics on the line are sexual abuse, anxiety and bullying.

All you have to do to get in touch with a crisis counselor is text the message “4hope” to 741-741, and you will be in contact with someone within a few minutes.

“Freshman year, I was in a relationship that wasn’t going stellar by that point and I was also sharing a very tiny room with someone I didn’t know,” said Rachel, a psychology student in the Boston, Massachusetts area. “So I didn’t have a lot of privacy. And if I wanted to talk to somebody, it was kinda difficult to do that, especially on the phone.”

Like a lot of young people, if Rachel wants a pizza delivered, she orders it online, so intimate discussions about relatively serious relationship concerns are pretty much off the table. Crisis Text Line is a far more accessible option for her. Rachel, who declined to offer her last name due to the personal nature of her story, was grateful to stumble upon it online.

“I had a relationship that wasn’t going great, I had mono, all my friends were home, I didn’t really have any friends at school… s**t was tough.”

Rachel has tried to use call lines in the past, but certain factors of her problems made it difficult to communicate.

“I was having a particularly bad time and my roommate was out so I was like, why not?” said Rachel. “It was mostly hard because I was crying a lot, and hard to understand. I think that’s another part of it. When you’re really upset, you’re not very articulate.”

Rachel used the Crisis Text Line a few more times throughout college, mainly throughout her Freshman and Sophomore years. She can laugh about her past experiences with anxiety and relationship issues now, but she says she’s not sure how she would have handled her anxiety without the text line.

On the other end of the line are volunteer crisis counselors, everyday people who sign up online, take a six-week training course, and are assigned different times of the week to actively help on the text line.

Madeline Williamson, a Kent State biology major, became a volunteer crisis counselor for Crisis Text Line during July.

“I was looking for volunteer opportunities and I just basically got online and I searched ‘crisis counseling’ like for a hot line,” said Williamson.

Despite the pressure of talking people through some of their most difficult moments, often multiple users at once depending on the time, Williamson is happy to take on the responsibility.

“I really wanted to help someone who needed it. And it’s high pressure, but they give you a lot of training actually… and it’s a really nice community,” said Williamson. “While you’re on the platform, there’s a chat of all the different crisis counselors so you can debrief about your conversations or just talk about silly stuff. It really takes a lot of the pressure off.”

Training to become a crisis counselor involves a 34-hour web-based training program and a background check. After training, counselors are assigned different times of the week to be available on the line. Crisis counselors are also able to call in a supervisor at any time during conversations for advice or support. They also have the ability to take emergency measures if they fear for the user’s life.

Crisis Text Line has a sister website called CrisisTrends.org where visitors can view the data trends gathered through millions of text message exchanges across the country. You can view information like, which day of the week has the most texts pertaining to stress (Wednesday), and which state has the most texts pertaining to depression (Maine).