Adolescent and Emerging Adult Help Seeking Using Anonymous Telephone and Live Chat Technology

Kids Help Phone is an on-demand, single-session, bilingual, free, and confidential service for young people in Canada who seek help for mental health issues and problems of daily living. 232 telephone clients and 230 Live Chat clients responded to the Counselling Client Questionnaire 2 (CCQ-2) to provide a demographic description of the youth who access this anonymous service, and assess and compare the effectiveness of telephone and text-based counselling. Transcripts of counselling sessions were analyzed using the Evidence of Mental Health Symptoms Scale for Adolescents (EMHSS-A) to describe the nature and level of risk associated with the situations clients brought to counselling, particularly as they related to mental health problems. 465 adolescents waiting in queue to access chat counselling responded to the Youth Self Report (YSR) to provide a description of the mental health symptoms of chat clients. Chat transcripts were further analyzed using the Collaborative Interactions Scale (CIS) to assess what works in terms of supporting the therapeutic relationship in time-synchronous text-to-text counselling. More clients had sexual and cultural minority identities than expected given their proportion in the population. 29% and 26% of clients were dealing with high- and medium-risk situations. According to the YSR, 64% of clients scored in the clinical range for affective problems, 56% for obsessive compulsive problems, and 51% for post-traumatic stress problems. Phone and chat clients reported decreased distress and perceived difficulty of their problems, and increased problem clarity, self-efficacy, and hope. Suggestions for how chat counsellors can manage ruptures and repairs in the therapeutic relationship are provided. Keywords: telephone counselling, e-counselling, computer-mediated communication, help-seeking, adolescence