24-hour phone assistance coming for youth facing mental and other challenges

A 24-hour youth support hotline to provide counselling and psychosocial support for people facing mental health issues and other challenges will be up and running from next Wednesday.

The Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment launched the 539-HELP(4357) number on Friday, with representatives of the Psychiatric Hospital and National Council on Substance Abuse (NCSA), and other stakeholders on hand.

“The youth hotline is intended to provide first-line counselling, referrals and psychosocial support to help vulnerable individuals to pass challenges such as stress, distress, planned violence, the breakdown of relationships, challenges, suicides, and burnout,” Youth Commissioner Joshua Moore told those gathered at the ministry’s Sky Mall, Haggatt Hall office.

He explained that the phone operators would be the first line of help and where they determine a caller needs further assistance, the individual would be passed on to the relevant partner agency.

“The launch of this initiative is a signal of intent by the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment. The eight months of planning that preceded this launch is testimony to our commitment to delivering a quality product,” Moore said.

He said the lead-up to the hotline launch involved the training of 31 prospective phone operators in workplace and community counselling skills through the University of the West Indies Lifelong Learning programme. That included 30 hours of practical training.

In the second phase, several stakeholders were brought on to lend their input and expertise to the buildout of a hotline that caters to a variety of sensitive scenarios.

“Very soon, members of the public will be able to access support services on a 24-hour basis through the youth hotline. Through our engagement with telecommunications supplier Digicel, we now have the equipment and software to accommodate multiple callers simultaneously. Digicel will also provide insights for us to measure key indicators, objectives, and expectations,” Moore added.

Minister of Youth, Sports and Community Empowerment Charles Griffith said that assisting young people who have challenging mental issues was a high priority for his ministry.

“I believe that our young people are walking fires, and the Government, through this ministry, is doing every single thing that is possible to extinguish the fires that our young people are walking through, and this hotline is one such initiative,” he said.

“COVID would have caused some tremendous problems in terms of our young people and how they treat to a number of different aspects of their life. I believe that it was necessary to provide, maybe in the first instance, just a sounding board for our young people, in terms of having somebody at the end of a line that is going to provide something positive for them in terms of how they traverse their particular journey.”

The Minister added that proactive steps needed to be taken to address society’s problems concerning the youth.

“We cannot reach the end of the tunnel to say there is light; hence, this hotline is taking that light into the tunnel. For those of you who are very religious, you also hear that ‘weeping may endure for the night, but joy will come in the morning’. This hotline is another attempt to make that night a lot shorter. Those of you know that there are several young people that that night lasts for years and years,” Griffith said.

shamarblunt@barbadostoday.bb ]]>