The surprising potency of texting in a crisis
A few years ago, Simmone Taitt started a for-profit counselling company called Poppy Seed to help women and new mothers suffering from mental health challenges around pregnancy, such as miscarriage and post-partum depression.
If she had done this a couple of decades earlier, the American entrepreneur might have focused on face-to-face counselling or telephone calls. But because we live in a digital age, Taitt decided to explore whether online support could work instead. That delivered a surprise. Although she had assumed clients would want to do counselling by video conferencing or phone, her market research showed they actually preferred to text.
While texting is a relatively laborious process and can feel fragmented, it has a crucial advantage: women can dispatch short messages to a therapist whenever they feel desperate, say in the middle of the night, without waking anyone else up. That is handy if you have an infant.
“There is benefit in what I call expert anonymity [from a therapist]. You don’t have to show up if you want help, but you can just chat with someone who is not in your network and who can give you practical tips you need in acute moments,” explains Taitt. She points out one grim, little-known statistic about motherhood in the US: suicide is now the biggest cause of death in young mothers due to a plague of mental health issues.
Between April 2021 and 2023, Poppy Seed has logged four million minutes’ worth of text-time (with each interaction lasting an average 37 minutes). But it is not the only group riding this trend. Last summer, the US government launched a revamped National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, which introduced a text-based option. This followed appeals from the Trevor Project, a non-profit aimed at preventing suicide among LGBT+ youth. Like Poppy Seed, it has found that the people it wants to help often prefer text communications.
There are other active text-based services, such as Crisis Text Line (a US non-profit that provides free mental health support) or Shout 85258 in the UK (a suicide prevention line). The latter arranged almost two million text conversations during the pandemic, and continues to grow, Victoria Hornby, head of Mental Health Innovations, which runs Shout, tells me. She thinks it appeals to users, who tend to be young, often LGBT+ and/or cognitively diverse, because it is private, easy to access and, crucially, gives people “more control” over the tempo of the interaction than a verbal conversation.
To some Gen-Xers like me, who did not grow up with mobile phones, this might seem a little shocking. After all, my generation was raised to believe that face-to-face contact was best for difficult or important conversations, followed by telephone calls. So much so, that I find it weird that my teens often prefer to communicate through endless texts than simply pick up the phone.
There is a large body of evidence from psychologists that appears to support Gen-Xers’ instincts. Most notably, studies show that when people hold conversations, communication occurs not via the actual content of the dialogue, but through the tone of voice, body language and reactive functions. That cannot be imparted via the written word, as anyone who has caused offence with an ill-judged text knows.
Moreover, psychologists suspect that the migration to digital communications is one key factor exacerbating the rise of mental health problems, particularly among teens. Jonathan Haidt at New York University has repeatedly argued that the level of teenage depression, self-loathing and isolation has surged in tandem with mobile phone use. My colleague John Burn-Murdoch has documented similar trends, as has the US chief medical officer, Vivek Murthy.
But history shows that innovation is a double-edged sword. Dashing into cyber space can create isolation, bullying and depression, but texts can also deliver good, as Poppy Seed and Shout show. Lockdowns made us all communication omnivores, jumping between platforms at different times for different needs. Some teens I know who are getting help for depression use face-to-face therapy, but also rely on Zoom, supplementing this with texts at moments of crisis. “It depends how I feel,” says one.
By pointing this out I do not mean to minimise the negative aspects of digitisation on our mental health; these are well documented. But the next time you feel tempted to decry the impact of tech on our lives, remember the upsides. The digital genie is not going back in the bottle, so the question is how do we harness the good to reduce the bad?
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This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Gillian Tett
