Crisis text line, suicide prevention through artificial intelligence

Toni Codina on 20 September 2022

Suicide prevention hotline which, in addition to offering accompaniment, emotional support and home interventions to thousands of people going through difficult situations, has an algorithm that allows the service’s volunteers to identify which people are at high risk of suicide and therefore need more urgent intervention.

The service works in such a way that the person in crisis sends a message saying “HOME” to the number 741741, and a specialised volunteer responds quickly and in real time. The service goes out of its way to help people in times of distress or crisis by listening to them, reassuring them, and offering suggestions for overcoming their difficulties.

As a service that receives thousands of requests, deciding who to help first in times of floods of messages can be a life-or-death decision. That’s why Crisis Text Line uses an algorithm to identify people at high risk of suicide and to be able to intervene as quickly as possible in these cases.

Using machine learning, the artificial intelligence algorithm analyses the words and emojis that may indicate that a person is at high risk of suicidal ideation or self-harm. The system developed is based on the analysis of 30 million messages that the service has exchanged with users in recent years, and is thus able to position as an emergency those conversations with high-risk patterns that need to be attended to more urgently. As a result, 94% of people at serious and imminent risk of suicide receive an intervention in less than 5 minutes.

In addition, the data collected provides the service with very relevant information about the mental health of the clients. For example, it has concluded that Wednesday is the most anxiety provoking day of the week, and that self-harm crises occur mainly in the early hours of the morning.

Characteristics of innovation

Lab, Bank of innovations, Mental health, New technological tool, Personalization of the service, Prediction and prevention, Speed up response times

Localization

United States

Partners / Funders

Center for suicide awareness, Thorn

Genesis

Crisis Text Line was born out of a vision to better serve people in crisis, and the inspiration began in 2011 when Nancy Lublin, the CEO of a leading online youth activist organisation, received a message from a teenage girl suffering from severe abuse. At the time there was a lack of trusted resources to access help, and so Lublin’s team began to devise a new paradigm for crisis intervention.

Level of implementation

Crisis Text Line went live in 2013, and within 4 months received messages from nearly every area code in the United States. It is now the largest text-based intervention service in the country.

Crisis Text Line has trained over 39,000 volunteers and has had over 4 million conversations with people in crisis.

The service is currently working to increase the speed of messages dealt with, with an increase of 72,000 text messages dealt with in less than 5 minutes in a year. Secondly, it seeks to detect and adjust the risk during the conversation with the person, beyond that detected in the initial messages. Finally, it is in the process of expanding internationally and in other languages. It currently operates in English in the United Kingdom, Canada and Ireland, and in English and Spanish in the United States.

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La Botiga, an integral programme of food guarantee, labour insertion and community participation.

Toni Codina on 13 September 2022

Supermarket that combines the distribution of food and other basic necessities to people assisted by the social services who cannot guarantee their right to food through the ordinary food distribution market, with the insertion of people with difficulties in accessing the labour market into the productive fabric of the municipality’s own food sector.

La Botiga operates as a supermarket open to the entire population, which also offers an adapted circuit for people referred by the basic social services of the municipality. It is organised on a self-service and/or assisted sales model, where food, hygiene, cleaning and other goods can be purchased. Users of social services can access by appointment, and before entering the space where they can buy food, they pass through a multipurpose room where group and community dynamics are carried out based on conversations between the people involved in the project. Moreover, with a circular logic, the people who make use of the space are involved in the management of the space, based on the principles of cooperativism and the Social and Solidarity Economy.

On the other hand, at La Botiga, the beneficiaries do not collect batches of food, but, through a system of points, choose the products they need themselves. These points, which are equivalent to the money to make the purchase, are assigned to them through the social services prescription sheet, depending on the situation of each person or family. In this way, La Botiga’s model seeks to overcome the welfare model in the field of food distribution.

La Botiga also uses the traditional supply channels of fruit and vegetables and other local products from the Baix Llobregat Agricultural Park and local businesses. This local economic fabric provides a product of solidarity, and at the same time strengthens the circuits that seek to reduce food waste through the reuse of the surplus generated, which also has an impact on improving the environmental health of the municipality.

In addition to the food guarantee service and projects to work on social skills or job skills, other activities and workshops are also carried out, for example to promote healthy eating habits or to encourage intercultural dialogue between users from different backgrounds.