• Crisis Text Line is committed to protecting our texter’s digital rights as their safety, privacy and confidentiality are essential pillars of our service. Protecting your privacy and your right to have your identity remain confidential is very important to us.  
• Our texters’ privacy is our top priority. All data is encrypted and, when submitted to our research database, fully de-identified and anonymized. We do not allow third parties to access personally identifiable information except as disclosed in our Privacy Policy. Texts to 741741 may not appear on phone bills for major mobile carriers to protect your privacy.  
• There is no privacy without data security. Crisis Text Line rigorously safeguards texter information through encryption, access control, intrusion detection and other precautionary methods to help ensure texters are safe and secure.
  
• Crisis Text Line has never monetized personally-identifiable information, and has no relationship with any third party organizations to monetize personally-identifiable information. We do not allow third parties to access personally identifiable information except as disclosed in our Privacy Policy.

Our responsibility is to support people in crisis. To ensure that we provide high quality support,  we continuously monitor trends in our de-identified anonymized dataset. This allows us to learn from our texters and continuously improve our training. 

For example, our internal research shows that when texters believe that a crisis counselor is generally concerned about them, they find the conversations more helpful. We use insights like this to help guide the way that crisis counselors interact with texters. We also use insights to ensure that we are providing our service in an equitable way, and to ensure that we are providing support at times when texters need it most, such as during times of high demand like evenings or Mondays.

There is a mental health emergency in the United States, and Crisis Text Line has been on the frontlines of this crisis. We believe it is our duty to support research efforts that might contribute solutions to help with this emergency. Over the past decade, researchers at our in-house Research & Impact team and our academic research collaborators have published over 26 peer-reviewed articles based on these anonymized and de-identified exchanges. These papers have been cited over 600 times. 

We hold our research partners to rigorous vetting standards, and researchers need to complete our 30-hour Crisis Counselor training before accessing Crisis Text Line information. Researchers must obtain the approval of an Institutional Review Board (IRB), have a Principal Investigator who is a full-time employee of the institution, and have the written approval of the institution’s Office of Research or equivalent office. To learn more about these collaborations, please visit https://www.crisistextline.org/data-philosophy/research-collaborations/.

We seek to inform the work of journalists, policymakers, and mental health organizations by providing a free public resource with summary insights. This de-identified, anonymized, aggregated trends dashboard updates automatically and shows insights like the percentage of conversations discussing anxiety in each U.S. state, or percent of conversations with certain demographics over time. Please visit CrisisTrends.org to learn more.

Our mission is to reach people where they are, when and where they need support. That means making Crisis Text Line easily available on platforms that are familiar to many people like text, web chat or Whatsapp. It also means that we partner with community organizations and nonprofits, local government agencies, universities, and corporations who are reaching people in crisis we wouldn’t otherwise reach.

Our partners help us pay for the costs of running our free service. In return, we help them learn how to support users in their communities. Together, we are helping destigmatize mental health and reach more people who might be in crisis. We also help our partners by providing aggregated, anonymized summary insights about their communities of concern, such as how many people are seeking help, key issues related to their crises, and what helps them feel better. (If you would like to become one of our partners, please contact us here.) As of 2022, Crisis Text Line has partnered with:

• 119 nonprofit organizations 
• 45 government organizations
• 26 schools and universities, and
• 56 corporations 

We collaborate with over 160 community partners who use custom keywords such as HOPE or BRAVE to reach their specific communities. Here is an example of a keyword partner dashboard where an organization can review unique insights such as volume trends, specific demographics, and geography and can learn about the top issues that texters discussed when reaching out for support.