Introduction to Text and Chat With text and chat services increasingly moving online, emotional support work – the core element of the work of crisis lines is needing to be adapted to work in new formats that require a change in your perspective and technique. On the telephone, there are a number of ways of…
Tag: crisis chat
Beginnings of an Online Crisis Chat Service
On June 29th, the Distress Centres of Dufferin/Wellington, Durham, Peel and Toronto joined together to launch an online crisis chat service. Texting through an unadvertised shortcode based on a service in the US or visiting our website provides access to a trained volunteer responder between 2pm and 2am. After running the service for a few…
@RealTimeCrisis, Tweeting those in distress
A shorter post this Family Day, I thought I would take a few minutes to talk about the Twitter handle @RealTimeCrisis. Started by a Toronto police officer and a street nurse, they trawl Twitter for people demonstrating signs of lethality and reach out to them. As I’ve written about in the past on my article on…
How to Respond to Suicide Threats on Social Media
As social media finds a greater and greater importance and significance in our lives, it’s important that we get better at responding to suicidal threats that appear on social media sites like Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. Failures To Respond There have been a number of situations where a failure to respond appropriately (or simply an…
Online Counselling and Suicide Intervention Specialist (OCSIS) Review
The Online Counselling and Suicide Intervention Specialist (OCSIS) course is an online, self-study 40-hour course designed to teach basic suicide intervention skills and focusing on online and chat environments, offered by the QPR Institute. Given the changes in help-seeking behaviour, with more people, especially youth moving online (Horrigan & Rainie, 2006) it’s important that helplines…