SOS-chat

Abstract

Autumn 2010, Kirkens SOS opened an anonymous chat service, in addition to the existing telephone and email services. During 2014, we answered about 7000 chats. The number of conversations received increased steadily from the start, despite the fact that Kirkens SOS-chat have not been a publicly promoted service. The majority of the chatters were girls between 13-19 years. They tell of high emotional pain in their lives, and they express the experience of being able to tell their story for the first time. A recurrent theme in the conversations is the person’s shame and great lack of self-love. Suicide (57%) is also a major theme and concern in these conversations, of which 17% are reported by our chat-staff as severe or acute suicide inquiries. The article give a brief introduction to Kirkens SOS’ experiences with conducting SOS chat, the difference between chat and telephone conversations, method, training, severe topics, who the users of our service are and the road ahead. One lesson we learned from conducting the service, is that chat service is time- and resource intensive. With that said; we now reach, with the chat-service, a potentially suicidal near group of adolescents, that we might not be able to reach through our traditional telephone service, which we have not been able to reach before. In the future, our goal is set to reach boys and men through our chat service.