The conversation began abruptly, with the anonymous teenager getting straight to the point: She had just told her family she was really a boy trapped in a female body. “Now my family hates me,” she told a crisis counselor.
The counselor was empathetic. She asked for more detail about the family, offered encouragement and provided the name of a local support group.
It was in many ways a typical exchange on a crisis hotline, except it took place entirely by texting.
While counseling by phone remains far more prevalent, texting has become such a fundamental way to communicate, particularly among people younger than 20, that crisis groups have begun to adopt it as an alternative way of providing emergency services and counseling.
Texting provides privacy that can be crucial if a person feels threatened by someone nearby, counselors say. It also looks more natural if the teenager is in public.
“They can still look ‘cool’ to their peers or friends while receiving assistance that they are in desperate need of,” said Jerry Weichman, a clinical psychologist in Newport Beach, Calif.
For counselors, texting allows them to deal with more than one person at a time and to introduce experts into a conversation without transferring or placing a caller on hold. Exchanges by text, they point out, also can resume more seamlessly after an interruption, because a written record of previous conversations already exists.
People texting for help receive the same services as those calling in, including risk assessment, emotional validation and collaborative problem solving. But the interaction plays out much differently, crisis experts say.
Texters tend to be more immediately in crisis than callers, the crisis experts say. Phones attract the lonely and pranksters the way text does not.
Ron White, chief program officer for Samaritans Inc., a suicide prevention organization in Boston part of the Crisis Text Line network, started using a texting service last August. He says texting conversations will have more pauses and play out over a longer time, but for some reason tend to be much more direct.
“On the phone, there is some time building a rapport,” he said, “but young people on text tend to get right to the point. They go to zero to 60 in a couple of seconds. The second or third message might be, ‘I am sitting here with pills and thinking about killing myself.’”
