Open Data Collaborations

Crisis Text Line empowers journalists, researchers, school administrators, parents, and anyone interested in data to understand the crises their communities face so we can work together to prevent future crises.

You may access our data in two ways: (1) browse aggregate trends in crisis around the U.S. at Crisis Trends, which updates daily. Or (2) apply to our Research Fellows program.

the Research Fellows Program

Crisis Text Line has the largest crisis data corpus in the U.S. To date, we’ve exchanged more than 100 million text messages between people in crisis and volunteer Crisis Counselors. Fellows are granted access to a scrubbed and anonymized version of this dataset.

To get a sense of the range of projects possible, see a list of published research papers below.

To be a Fellow, you must meet the following key requirements:

• Be affiliated with an academic or research institution. This includes obtaining the approval of an IRB, having a Principal Investigator that’s a full-time employee of the institution, and the written approval of your institution’s Office of Research or equivalent office.

• Work from our NYC offices. Currently, we cannot offer VPN access or share data. We provide our Fellows (one researcher per team) with stipends to cover room, board, and travel to NYC.

• Expect to spend 3-6 months working on their project. Expect to spend half or more of that time on-site in NYC. Time spent on-site does not need to be continuous, but it will be frequent!

• Have the technical expertise to work with massive data sets. There will be a test :)

• Be a U.S. or Canadian citizen. We need this for background checks.

See the full list of requirements. If you meet all requirements, Apply here.

Note: spots are limited. We take 1-2 Fellows at a time. Apply today to reserve your spot in the program. Applications are reviewed quarterly.

published Research

• Accepted for publication: Understanding how text message-based crisis counseling facilitates child maltreatment disclosures 2020.

• Engagement With Crisis Text Line Among Subgroups of Users Who Reported Suicidality; Hannah Selene Szlyk (Washington University in St. Louis), Kimberly Beth Roth, Víctor García-Perdomo; Psychiatric Services 2019.

• Crisis Text Patterns in Youth following the Release of 13 Reasons Why Season 2 and Celebrity Suicides: A Case Study of Summer 2018; Margaret M. Sugg (Appalachian State University), Kurt D. Michael (Appalachian State University), Scott S.Stevens (North Carolina State University), Robert Filbin, Jaclyn Weiser, Jennifer D. Runkle (North Carolina State University); Preventive Medicine Reports October 2019.

• Finding Your Voice: The Linguistic Development of Mental Health Counselors; Justine Zhang (Cornell University), Robert Filbin, Christine Morrison, Jaclyn Weiser, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil (Cornell University); Proceedings of ACL 2019.

• Crisis support-seeking behavior and temperature in the United States: Is there an association in young adults and adolescents?; Margaret M. Sugg (Appalachian State University), P. Grady Dixon (Fort Hays State University), Jennifer D. Runkle (North Carolina State University); Science of The Total Environment 2019.

• Child Maltreatment Disclosure to a Text Messaging–Based Crisis Service: Content Analysis; Laura Schwab-Reese (Purdue University), Nitya Kanuri (Yale University), Scottye Cash (The Ohio State University); JMIR Mhealth Uhealth 2019.

• Protecting User Privacy and Rights in Academic Data-Sharing Partnerships: Principles From a Pilot Program at Crisis Text Line; Anthony R Pisani (University of Rochester Medical Center) et al.; J Med Internet Res 2019.

• Crisis Text Line use following the release of Netflix series 13 Reasons Why Season 1: Time-series analysis of help-seeking behavior in youth; Laura K. Thompson (Appalachian State University), Kurt Michael, Margaret M. Sugg; Prev Med Rep. 2019.

• Geospatial suicide clusters and emergency responses: An analysis of text messages to a crisis service; Mark E. Larsen (Black Dog Institute, University of New South Wales), Michelle Torok, Kit Huckvale, Bilal Reda, Sofian Berrouiguet, Helen Christensen; 41st Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society 2019.

• Adolescents in crisis: A geographic exploration of help-seeking behavior using data from Crisis Text Line; Laura K. Thompson (Appalachian State University), Margaret M. Sugg, Jennifer R. Runkle (North Carolina State University), Social Science & Medicine 2018.

• Large-scale Analysis of Counseling Conversations: An Application of Natural Language Processing to Mental Health; Tim Althoff (Stanford University), Kevin Clark, Jure Leskovec; Association for Computational Linguistics 2016.

• Mixed-Initiative Real-Time Topic Modeling & Visualization for Crisis Counseling; Karthik Dinakar (MIT Media Lab), Jackie Chen, Henry Lieberman, Rosalind W. Picard; MIT Media Lab 2015.