Online chat created for Vancouver hailed as effective suicide prevention tool

An innovative new chat application aimed at preventing teen suicide could be the recipient of a million dollars, which would be used to sell it internationally, and to bolster its limited use in the Vancouver area to a 24/7 operation. The chat application, used by Vancouver’s crisis centre, has garnered developer At Large Media a nomination for the prize money by VanCity, a local socially progressive bank. Emma Payne, a principal of At Large, tells Canadian NEW MEDIA that the application has helped the centre be more effective in reaching out to at risk youth than traditional telephone crisis lines. She adds that the firm and its partners hope to be able to offer it across North America to even smaller centres that may have little technological sophistication. Payne says the chat application was developed since teen and youth calls to crisis centres are in decline, while suicide rates climb. At Large and its partners, which include the University of British Columbia and a group called Suicide Attempt Follow-up, Education and Research (offered by Vancouver Community Mental Health Services), asked teens why they seemed reluctant to call help lines. Says Payne: "The logical question was, ok, if they don’t to talk over the phone line, how would they communicate with us? So, we went out and asked them. They said, well, we’re more comfortable chatting online, whether it’s about a private, anonymous issue, or whether it’s a crisis or not. They like chatting online, right? So, it wasn’t really rocket science, but in the world of crisis centres, that was a big leap to think about actually communicating online." Funding was put together through a consortium of provincial and municipal authorities, and At Large and the crisis centre built a chat application with specialized features such as call queuing and monitoring, and some preliminary information gathering about age and location. The chat is in operation currently just four hours a day, which, Payne says, is insufficient to meet the demand. "We try to operate it just at the times that are the most visited. But, obviously, what we’re doing now is pulling together funding to go 24/7 because kids can be in crisis at anytime. The bottleneck there is about training the volunteers and having enough people on the other end ready. It’s not the technology. The technology could take 24 hours a day and 50 people at a time. But, we need to obviously ramp up in terms of having computer stations available for the volunteers, the counsellors to use. So, it’s really just that. We launched it last January. We’re now up to at least – even just the four hours a day – we were doing at least 50 chats a month, averaging half an hour. So, from a web usage perspective, that’s huge numbers." Payne notes that the method seems to be working. Besides a high demand, she says that fully 40% of chats deal with suicide prevention, rather than with more general crisis intervention. The same figure, she says, is just 8% using telephone methodologies. Suicide is the second largest cause of death among young people in B.C. Training volunteers to handle greater volumes of chats will prove the key hurdle to making the service available to greater numbers of youths. She notes that Internet chat is unlike spoken conversations, with volunteers needing training beyond that given for the telephone in new areas such as emotions and the sometimes blunter language that people use online when they are anonymous. It’s that anonymity, however, that Payne suspects is responsible for the apparent effectiveness of online chat as a suicide prevention strategy. She notes that some youth may not call a crisis centre if they’re afraid of being overheard by parents or even of breaking down emotionally on the phone. Payne says that while there are many resources on the site for youth dealing with suicidal feelings, the only heavily trafficked part of the site besides the chat itself is the "hide" function, which disguises the site’s contents in an instant. "I think anyone who’s ever been through a difficult time knows that sometimes it’s easier to write it down or to almost say it to yourself than it is to pick the phone up and say it out loud. It’s almost like an extra bit of level of distance or comfort, so when the young people are chatting with the counsellors, you can tell that they haven’t actually even said it to themselves yet. So, it’s just a comfortable way for them to get it out." Word of the availability of the chat has been mostly a matter of visiting schools as part of a crisis centre outreach effort. Payne says centre staff are currently speaking to about 2,000 students a month in 1,500 presentations a year. School counsellors have been provided with screensavers that they’ve downloaded to office PCs with the youthinbc.com web address. At Large and its partners have spoken twice now at conferences of suicide prevention workers, where interest in the application has been intense. Winning the VanCity prize would, Payne says, allow the consortium to accelerate plans to offer the service on an ASP basis. She says offering a managed and hosted service is critical since many crisis centres lack even basic computers. Hosting and running a server-based solution would likely be too onerous for those sites. A win would also allow the crisis centre to begin offering a 24/7 service, and could also be expanded to include chats for at risk adults, as well as be used for community-specific organizations such as those serving gay and lesbian clientele. The ASP model will also create a revenue stream for the centre that could be used to speed up training for the volunteers needed to staff an expanded operation. Payne says those plans will go ahead, however, even in the absence of the VanCity cash infusion. The initiative recently won a $90,000 grant from B.C. Technology Social Venture Partners over three years, which will aid in developing the ASP infrastructure. That should, Payne says, create a revenue stream to accomplish the rest of the game plan. "It’s going to be very difficult without a big investment to do those things as quickly as we’d like, because people are asking for them now. Kids are coming every month and they’re, like, why weren’t you open at this time? We just sort of feel as though it’s needed now. So, that takes either a big chunk of money or – something." The VanCity award likely will be announced in mid-November after a vote on the shortlisted candidates by the bank’s account holders.

Online chat created for Vancouver hailed as effective suicide prevention tool

Broadcast | July 8, 2005

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