Crisis Text Line offers insight into back-to-school stress for SWFL students

Reporter: Lindsey Sablan
Published: Updated:

School starts Friday for Lee, Charlotte and Hendry counties and a return to the classroom means a return to stress for many students.

A free text service, Crisis Text Line, will offer support to children and teens in times of need.

Last fall, we introduced you to three Broward County high schoolers shining a light on mental health issues among classmates.

“We’ve got such a big stress load that’s given to us between school work, real work with jobs and friends and relations,” said one student.

With that stress load, they wanted their peers to know about Crisis Text Line, a free service that you can text anytime to talk to a trained counselor. The service allows you to speak anonymously.

“Even though it is anonymous we are able to extract very important, real-time information from the data that we gather,” said Shairi Turner who is Chief Medical Officer at Crisis Text Line.

WINK News asked Turner to take a look at trends in student concerns during the back-to-school season last year.

They looked at two age groups who used the texting service:13 and under and 14 to 17-year-olds.

 

In a conversation with a volunteer crisis counselor, these issues were tagged X% of the time. Multiple issue topics can be tagged from a given conversation with a texter. This data comes from the post conversation survey that the volunteer crisis counselor completes at the end of the text conversation. Graph made with Meta-Chart using data from Crisis Text Line.
In a conversation with a volunteer crisis counselor, these issues were tagged X% of the time. Multiple issue topics can be tagged from a given conversation with a texter. This data comes from the post conversation survey that the volunteer crisis counselor completes at the end of the text conversation. Graph made with Meta-Chart using data from Crisis Text Line.

The topics they saw the most were relationships, suicide, anxiety, stress, loneliness, self-harm and isolation, according to Turner.

But by far the number one topic was relationships. Relationships were followed by suicide, depression and stress. All of these topics of concern varied in order depending on the age group.

“Kids this age have some very serious concerns that we can’t assume that although they’ve not reached their teenage years, that they don’t suffer from some very significant concerns,” Turner said.

That’s something you don’t have to tell these teens. The other trend that Crisis Line noticed was stress of school impacting non-white children is twice as much as white students who are texting in to the service.

The best ways you can help are to engage your child and ask how they are doing.

Texters said the best ways they’ve coped with school stress are through friends, therapy, music and journaling.

To read more about the Crisis Text Line service, or if you need to speak to someone, text 741741 from anywhere in the USA to text with a trained Crisis Counselor.

MORE: Crisis Text Line proves strength for some after tragedies strike

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