History
In May 1970 at Essex University, an ex-director of Colchester Samaritans and a chaplain noticed the high suicide rate amongst local students and decided to train a group of students to provide peer support from a small room in campus. Thus, the first ever Nightline began. The idea of offering peer to peer support throughout the night, when few other student specific services were available, soon caught on.
In 1974 Bangor University opened the tenth Nightline in the UK, and it is still going strong today. As you can imagine Bangor Nightline has developed a lot in its 37 years of service. We have gone from a handful of student volunteers to almost 70 volunteers who donate more than 5000 hours a year to support and assist almost 1000 callers a year. We have regular recruitment and training sessions with valuable sessions from the School of Lifelong Learning, the Samaritans, and other national support agencies. Our opening times have been extended over the years and we now offer our service from 8pm-8am every night of term. We are constantly striving to make the service bigger and better, so watch this space as Nightlines history is still being made!
Nightlines across the UK have continued to spring up from Exeter to St Andrews. There are now 34 Nightlines in the UK, covering 124 colleges and univeristies. In 2006 nightlines came together to form the National Nightline Association which supports nightlines, like ours, while also helping new ones to form. The concept of Nightlines peer to peer listening and information line has continued to spread to America, Germany, and most recently in Africa with the support of National Nightline.