PSA - Crisis Text Line

The Crisis Text Line is an American organisation that employs volunteers who have to go through a training course to learn active listening skills in order to help people who are in crisis. While the organisation is not designed to be a counselor or replace any current counseling or psychological treatment, they do provide an ear to listen to via text message. The service is as anonymous as you want it to be – volunteers are only given whichever information you provide in your messages.

Any community can have a high level of crisis issues within community members, but Lifestyle communities seem to have more than their fair share and our community seems to have a large number of people who prefer to communicate via text than via voice, so we wanted to make Cuff-Link users aware of this service.

Unfortunately, it is only available in the United States so far, and your cellular service must be capable of using short codes, but it’s a start. The CTL also has a call to action for individuals interested in starting a CTL in their own country. In the mean time, if anyone is aware of a similar service in other countries, feel free to let us know, and we’ll post it here.

The CTL also has a related endeavour on the same site, which is data on which crises seem to be ‘trending’. In other words, which things are currently preying on peoples’ minds and wreaking havoc.

Main website is: http://www.crisistextline.org/

Crisis trends: http://www.crisistextline.org/trends/

We hope this helps,

CL Staff.