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. 2021 Jun 3;18(11):6024.
doi: 10.3390/ijerph18116024.

Help-Seeking from a National Youth Helpline in Australia: An Analysis of Kids Helpline Contacts

David Watling  1 , Samantha Batchelor  2 , Brian Collyer  2 , Sharna Mathieu  1 , Victoria Ross  1 , Susan H Spence  1 , Kairi Kõlves  1
Affiliations

Help-Seeking from a National Youth Helpline in Australia: An Analysis of Kids Helpline Contacts

David Watling et al. Int J Environ Res Public Health. .

Abstract

Counselling helplines or hotlines are key support services for young people with mental health concerns or in suicide and self-harm crises. We aimed to describe young peoples' use of a national youth helpline (Kids Helpline, Australia, KHL) to understand how usage changed over time. A descriptive analysis was conducted on 1,415,228 answered contacts between 2012-2018. We described the trend of service usage over the observed period, the types of youth who used the service, and the problems young people contacted the service about. Phone (APC = -9.1, KHL: -10.4 to -7.8, p < 0.001) and email (APC = -13.7, 95%CI: -17.1 to -10.2, p < 0.001) contacts decreased over time whereas webchat contacts increased (APC = 16.7, 95%CI: 11.7 to 22.0, p < 0.001). With this increase in webchat contacts, there was an associated increase in total webchat contact duration. Concerns raised in contacts to the service were primarily related to emotional wellbeing and mental health concerns (53.2% phone, 57.3% webchat, 58.2% email) followed by social relationship issues (20.4% phone, 20.3% webchat, 16.8% email) and family relationships (19.4% phone, 17.2% webchat, 21.8% email). The increased preference for online text-based information and counselling services can help inform development of services for young people and allocation of staff/service training and resources.

Keywords: adolescence; crisis hotline; help-seeking; online counselling; telephone counselling; young people; youth helpline.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funding body had no involvement in study design, data collection, analysis/interpretation, manuscript preparation or submission.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Number of contacts to KHL service in 2012–2018: (a) total, (b) counselling contacts, (c) information and referral contacts.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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