Shout is the UK’s only free, 24/7 text messaging support service. It’s the first service from Mental Health Innovations.
The service is proven to reach new audiences who will text but not talk and take pressure off phone lines. Shout launched publicly in May 2019 and has scaled rapidly due to huge and growing demand from children, young people and adults who are anxious, depressed or suicidal and who need crisis support.
Conversations are taken by trained volunteers, with real-time clinical oversight. As a digital service, the anonymised Shout dataset gives unique insight into UK mental health trends.
Shout Volunteers have taken more than 2 million conversations with 675,000 children, young people and adults who are anxious, stressed, depressed, suicidal or overwhelmed and who need immediate support. 62% of the people who have texted Shout are under-25.
Shout operates at scale, taking between 1,500 and 2,000 conversations a day. As a digital service this puts us in a unique position of being able to identify and understand patterns in mental health needs across the UK in real time.
