Crisis Text Line, a non-profit organization that operates a 24/7 mental health texting hotline for teens, has made its data set of text message interactions with users freely available to qualified researchers. The data set, which contains over 13 million anonymized messages exchanged since the hotline’s launch in August 2013, is the largest open data set of mental health crisis data in the United States. The messages, which do not contain personally identifiable information, will enable researchers to better understand trends in mental health issues, such as relationships between messages related to bullying and depression. Crisis Text Line has also created a visualization using aggregate data for the general public to explore these trends.
Image: JohnnyMrNinja.