Searching About Suicide and Crisis Hotlines Online: A Temporal and Geospatial Infodemiological Analysis

Suicide remains a leading global public health concern, and crisis hotlines are a critical preventive intervention. However, there is a paucity in studies about how population-level digital information-seeking behaviors for suicide and crisis hotlines evolve across time and countries.

This study aimed to (1) examine temporal trends and seasonality of global Google searches for "Suicide" and "Crisis Hotline," (2) analyze their temporal associations through cross-lagged correlations, and (3) identify country clusters based on all-time relative search volumes (RSVs).

Monthly global RSVs (2004-2025) and country-level all-time RSVs were extracted from Google Trends. Time-series analyses included Seasonal and Trend decomposition using Loess (STL) decomposition, Kruskal-Wallis tests for seasonality, Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) forecasting, Pearson correlations, and cross-lagged correlations of raw and detrended series. K-means clustering was applied to country-level data.

Suicide searches showed persistent baseline levels with spikes in 2009-2010, 2014, 2017-2018, and 2020-2021. Crisis hotline searches rose sharply from the late 2010s, accelerating during the COVID-19 period. Seasonality was significant for suicide but not for hotlines. Cross-lagged analysis showed a +22-month raw lag (r = .22) that disappeared after detrending, leaving only a contemporaneous association (r = .31). Four global clusters highlighted disparities in suicide versus crisis hotline interest.

Google Trends can serve as a proxy for real-time public demand for suicide prevention resources. Findings emphasize the need for agile, context-sensitive strategies to strengthen hotline visibility and accessibility globally.