Nancy Lublin, founder and CEO of Crisis Text Line, was on a mission to put the brightest people on the world's biggest problems. In 2013, Lublin set out to create a nonprofit organization that would provide free crisis intervention over text message. Listen below as Lublin explains how one text message laid the foundation for Crisis Text Line.
Crisis Text Line was born from an initial “edge case," something that is not the core use of a product or platform but rather something that occurs on the margin. This edge case had evolved into an entirely new support model for people in crisis, enabling seamless communication between an empathetic listener - a Crisis Counselor - and a person in crisis.
The process was simple and straightforward:
After a few minutes, a trained Crisis Counselor answered the bid for help. Just like that, two strangers could communicate during a moment of extreme duress, a lifeline over chat that would remain intensely personal and private, without any spoken words.
In 2017, Crisis Text Line served over 5,000 texters a day with a team of more than 3,000 volunteer Crisis Counselors, all of whom were supported by a passionate group of employees that Lublin had handpicked to grow and sustain the business. The organization started from 3 key employees and grew to over 60 people focused on operations, engineering, coaching, supervising, and community engagement. These employees had been vital to the development of a proprietary technological platform to manage near-constant organic user growth. This large ecosystem had enabled Crisis Text Line to amass one of the largest data sets on mental health in the world, disrupting an industry that was in dire need of change.
As of 2015, suicide was the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, amounting to more than 40,000 deaths from 500,000 documented attempts. This amounted to a death by suicide approximately every 10 minutes, and this number continued to rise.
Source: Centers for Disease Control
From 1999 to 2014, the National Institutes of Health observed a 24 percent increase in the population suicide rate, with the largest increases seen among 10 to 14 year old girls and 45 to 64 year old men. For youth, suicide was the second leading cause of death.
Crisis and suicide hotlines had traditionally been the primary resource to serve people in crisis, however no one had really questioned if the industry needed a change. There had also been little movement to meet the changing trends. Young people were simply spending less time talking and more time texting. Clearly these factors contributed to the ‘edge case’ that sparked the birth of Crisis Text Line, driving Lublin and her team to build the future of crisis intervention.