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A few years ago, Simmone Taitt launched a profit-making counseling company known as Poppy Seed. The purpose of this endeavor was to assist women and new mothers dealing with mental health challenges during pregnancy, including post-partum depression and miscarriage.
In the past, face-to-face counseling or phone calls would have been the primary focus if she had started this venture a couple of decades earlier. However, living in the digital age, Taitt chose to explore the potential of online support. To her surprise, market research showed that clients preferred text-based counseling over video conferencing or phone calls.
While texting can be a laborious and fragmented process, it offers a crucial advantage: women can send short messages to their therapist whenever they feel desperate, even in the middle of the night, without disturbing anyone else. This convenience is especially important for mothers with infants.
“Expert anonymity [from a therapist] has its benefits,” explains Taitt. “You don’t have to physically show up to receive help. Instead, you can chat with someone outside your network who can provide practical tips during critical moments.” Taitt also highlights a little-known statistic about motherhood in the US: suicide is now the leading cause of death among young mothers due to mental health issues.
From April 2021 to 2023, Poppy Seed has accumulated four million minutes of text-based counseling, with an average interaction duration of 37 minutes. However, Poppy Seed is not the only group capitalizing on this trend. Last summer, the US government revamped the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline to include a text-based option, responding to appeals from organizations like the Trevor Project, which focuses on preventing suicide among LGBT+ youth. Similar to Poppy Seed, these organizations have found that their target audience often prefers text-based communication.
Other active text-based services include Crisis Text Line, which provides free mental health support in the US, and Shout 85258, a suicide prevention line in the UK. Shout arranged nearly two million text conversations during the pandemic and continues to grow. Victoria Hornby, head of Mental Health Innovations, which runs Shout, believes that text-based support appeals to young users, especially those who are LGBT+ or have cognitive differences, because it offers privacy, easy accessibility, and greater control over the pacing of the interaction compared to verbal conversations.
For Gen-Xers like myself, who didn’t grow up with mobile phones, this preference for texting may seem surprising. Our generation was raised to believe that face-to-face contact or phone calls were best for important or difficult conversations. It’s still strange to me that my teenagers prefer endless texting over a simple phone call.
Psychologists have extensively studied the effects of different communication methods and have found that conversations rely not only on the dialogue’s content but also on tone of voice, body language, and reactive functions. These aspects cannot be conveyed through written words, as anyone who has misinterpreted a text can attest.
Psychologists also suspect that the shift to digital communication is a contributing factor to the rise in mental health problems, especially among teenagers. Researchers like Jonathan Haidt at New York University have linked increased mobile phone use to higher rates of teenage depression, self-loathing, and isolation. These trends have been documented by experts, including US Chief Medical Officer Vivek Murthy and my colleague John Burn-Murdoch.
However, history has shown that innovation has both positive and negative effects. Venturing into cyberspace can lead to isolation, bullying, and depression. On the other hand, texting can also bring about positive outcomes, as demonstrated by Poppy Seed and Shout. During lockdowns, we became communication omnivores, switching between platforms to meet different needs at different times. Some teenagers I know who seek help for depression rely on both face-to-face therapy and Zoom sessions, supplementing these with texts during moments of crisis. “It depends on how I feel,” says one.
I don’t mean to downplay the negative impact of digitalization on mental health, as these effects are well-documented. But the next time you criticize the influence of technology on our lives, remember its positive aspects. The digital revolution cannot be undone, so the question is how we can harness its benefits to minimize the drawbacks.
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