Expanding Suicide Crisis Services to Text and Chat

Area of Science:

• Mental Health Services
• Crisis Intervention
• Digital Health

Background:

• Historically, suicide prevention hotlines relied on phone-based support.
• Emerging modalities like internet chat and text messaging are expanding crisis support accessibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the distinct utilization patterns of phone versus chat/text crisis support services.
• To understand responder perspectives on veteran engagement with different crisis support modalities.

Main Methods:

• Conducted semistructured interviews with crisis responders at the Veterans Crisis Line.
• Focused on responders utilizing multimodal approaches to veteran crisis intervention.

Main Results:

• Veterans may prefer chat/text for anonymity or inability to use phone services.
• Chat/text is frequently used for initial contact with mental health services.
• Responders had mixed views on whether issues or suicide risk differed between phone and chat/text users.

Conclusions:

• Chat and text services show promise in supplementing, not replacing, phone-based crisis support.
• Qualitative nature and responder-only perspective may limit generalizability.