The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Suicide Prevention Hotline, in partnership with Link2Health Solutions, administrators of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, recently launched an online chat service for veterans in emotional distress available at: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/Veterans. Veterans are encouraged to chat online anonymously with a counselor available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Veterans Chat enables Veterans, their families and friends to go online where they can anonymously chat with a trained VA counselor. If the chats are determined to be a crisis, the counselor can take immediate steps to transfer the chatter to the Veterans Suicide Prevention Hotline, where further counseling and referral services are provided and crisis intervention steps can be taken.