In a couple weeks, mental health services will be just a text message away for people in St. Johns County thanks to a new program from Flagler Hospital.
The hospital is partnering with “Crisis Text Line” to connect people in need with services available in the local community. The program will be run through St. Johns Care Connect, a community alliance founded by Flagler Hospital to connect area residents in need with available resources.
“Anything from anxiety to depression to a true crisis that they could be texting in about,” Paige Stanton, a community health associate and registered mental health counseling intern at Flagler Hospital, said.
Stanton has been working to bring Crisis Text Line to St. Johns County since October. The service will launch on January 18.
The process is simple; a person texts “CARE4U,” St. Johns County’s unique code word, to 741741.
“Within five minutes you should have access to a trained crisis counselor,” Stanton said, adding the counselors have at least 30 hours of training. “[The counselor will] walk you through, kind of, a plan on how to deescalate, give you some skills and things like that and then ultimately what they can do is they can refer out to resources in the community.”
According to data from the Florida Department of Health, suicides in St. Johns County reached a 20-year high in 2017. While anyone can use the Crisis Text Line, Stanton hoped children and teens take advantage of the service.
“Higher expectations, social media, things like that,” Stanton said. “We’re definitely seeing higher rates of anxiety, depression.”
According to data tracked by Crisis Text Line, text messages spiked during school lunchtime.
“The kids are actually sitting at the table and you may think that they’re texting their friend, or their parents, or just talking to anyone,” Stanton said. “When really they can be talking to one of those crisis counselors.”
Because St. Johns County has its own code word, providers can pull key words from the text messages to track trends. That, in turn, will help them determine what the biggest needs are and how they can work to fix it.