Pledge to make a difference, together.
Youthline is New Zealand's leading youth mental health and youth development organisation. We have been supporting rangatahi and whanau across Aotearoa for more than 50 years.
Our vision is to create communities that relate to the needs of rangatahi, respond to them and support them to achieve their potential.
Youthline is well known as "the number one place for rangatahi to reach out to for support" with 76% of rangatahi being aware of Youthline (Colmar Brunton 2021) and 1 in 5 reporting that they have contacted us for support at some stage.
We offer a free 24/7 Helpline (phone, text, web, email), individual face-to-face and video counselling, whanau therapy counselling, individual and group mentoring along with youth development programmes in schools and the community.
The Youthline Helpline is at the heart of our mahi and is delivered by 200 trained volunteer counsellors supported by triage staff.
Many of the young people who contact us are often vulnerable, disadvantaged, disengaged and disillusioned. They often feel lonely and have no sense of belonging to family, school or community. More young people are presenting with mental health issues than ever before. And of these, more are presenting with suicide issues than ever before. Last year we managed more than 243,000 contacts through our Helpline service. Of the texts received 1 in 2 young people presented with mental health issues and 1 in 5 were related to suicide risk.
We have the ability to refer rangatahi to other Youthline services such as mentoring or face-to-face counselling or support services within their own communities. We actively encourage rangatahi to firstly seek or explore what support that they have available within their own whanau before reaching out to external services as we know that whanau connection and a sense of belonging is fundamental to a young person's positive development . For whanau, we can also provide free individual and whanau counselling.
The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted New Zealand society, has changed the way we live and work for the foreseeable future and has increased the demand for our services to a significant degree and placed additional pressure on our already stretched resources. With COVID we saw a doubling of contacts from young people reaching out for support, a 90% increase in care and protection matters and a 23% increase in suicide risk. Our Face-to-Face Therapy Services have experienced a 300% increase in suicide risk. Risk levels continue to be higher than average and during the latest lockdown we have seen the highest number of critical incidents in a single week (117), in our organisation's 50 year history.
Further, just as the pandemic itself has been described as having a long tail, we know from research and experience that the pandemic will have a long mental health tail and the ongoing need for counselling services will also have long tail. And, while going down levels has represented a reduction in restrictions, the negative economic and social conditions of the pandemic will impact for the foreseeable future.
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