Descriptive data example (and more) from Crisis Text Hotline

This blog post was inspired by the brilliant Leslie Berntsen. Her ACT 2021 presentation, "I'm not a therapist: Mental health education and advocacy for non-clinicians," was about teaching and sharing sound practices in mental health care when you, yourself, are not a mental-health-care-type-psychologist. 

Anyway, she had this really great idea about sharing user/trends/etc. data from the Crisis Text Line (CTL) with students. CTL is a text-based mental health crisis hotline. It is staffed 24/7. I include it on my syllabus as a resource for my struggling students because, unlike my uni's very hard-working counseling center, CTL is always available. 

https://www.crisistextline.org/

Why share data from CTL in your stats class? Because you can use it to a) teach a bit of stats, b) introduce students who need this resource to the resource, c) introduce potential volunteers to the service. Here are my ideas for how you could use this data in class.

1. Data visualizations to tell a story:

Line graphs of hotline use over time (customizable by crisis type):

https://crisistrends.org/

Bar graphs of hotline use by the time of day (customizable by crisis type and state)

https://crisistrends.org/

Heat map of state rankings (customizable by crisis type):

https://crisistrends.org/

2. The CTH data illustrates how clinical psychologists may use data to inform practice:

Sometimes, psychological statistics students don't see how stats can improve clinical practices. Of course, we know that they do via traditional research, but CTH uses data for training (hey, I/O psychologists!), improves service, and predicts when the service will be used more heavily. 

https://www.crisistextline.org/data-philosophy/

3. You can apply for access to their data and analyze it yourself. I'm sure some of you clever people could turn this into a fantastic class project.

4. You never know who needs help. Or know someone who needs help. By sharing this data, you are sharing the resource.

5. You also never know which of your students are looking for an internship or volunteer opportunity. I think this one is especially helpful since a student can set their own hours AND all they need is a cell phone. This might be particularly useful for students with care-giving duties or physical limitations. 

If you really want to deep dive, you can even sign up as a collaborator and gain access to their data.

If you are looking for a pop article to introduce this topic, Mashable did a good summary of the data they collected.