BBC Action Line receives more than 850,000 requests for support in 2022

“As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has played an important role this year in highlighting a range of mental health issues in our programmes and providing off air information about organisations which can offer help. We will continue to offer vital support and information, encouraged by the powerful storylines and campaigns across the BBC, helping the many thousands of people affected by these issues.”

— Nick Mason, BBC Head of Audience Services

BBC Action Line received 851,962 calls and online visits to its support information services in 2022, prompted by programmes including Panorama, Louis Theroux Interviews... and EastEnders exploring mental health related issues. The latter with episodes featuring characters Jean Slater’s bipolar disorder and Amy Mitchell’s self-harm.

This year, the Action Line received the highest number of contacts about suicide, sexual abuse, mental health and self-harm, with 368,733 people seeking support encouraged by powerful programming and storylines that shine a light on issues which audiences may have been affected by themselves.

Programmes that prompted people to seek help for mental health issues included Panorama: Mental health: Young lives in crisis, Joe Wicks: Facing My Childhood, Gazza, Olly Alexander: Growing Up Gay, Louis Theroux Interviews... Yungblud, Jesy Nelson: Odd One Out, Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof, Joey Essex: Grief and Me and Roman Kemp: Our Silent Emergency.

Nick Mason, BBC Head of Audience Services, says: "As a public service broadcaster, the BBC has played an important role this year in highlighting a range of mental health issues in our programmes and providing off air information about organisations which can offer help. We will continue to offer vital support and information, encouraged by the powerful storylines and campaigns across the BBC, helping the many thousands of people affected by these issues.”

In 2021 BBC Action Line broadened the support it offers audiences online. The webpage for mental health now includes support for self-harm, while the debt page covers issues of hardship and homelessness.

Other programmes that led to significant requests for support to the Action Line included:

• Morning Live, Countryfile and several programmes on Radio 5 Live used the Action Line to support hardship, debt and homelessness which prompted over 27,000 calls and online visits.
• For Love or Money and Scam Land raised the issues of fraud and prompted 10,847 visits.
• Following programmes about missing people on The One Show, Doctors, River City and The Archers, there were over 9,000 visits.
• Programmes about MND including Rob Burrow: Living with MND and The Split prompted over 4,000 visits.
• Finally, The Archers on Radio 4 highlighted Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders in a storyline involving the character Alice Carter in January 2022, which prompted over 5,000 visits to the Action Line.

In October this year, a new Action Line was added to support BBC Bitesize which has had over 1,600 visits to the webpage to date. And since BBC Three became a linear channel in February, the Action Line has supported many of its programmes including RuPaul’s Drag Race, Fresh Cops and Santa Claus: The Serial Killer.

Find out more about the range of services provided by BBC Action Line here.