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Do you find it easier to share your feelings with teenagers than with adults? What’s the best advice you’ve been given by someone your own age?
In “It Takes a Teenager to Help a Teenager in Crisis,” Catherine Cheney writes about a nonprofit crisis hotline where adolescents receive counsel from their peers. She writes:
After losing his best friend to suicide, Taylor Harrison, then 18, was looking for ways to honor the memory of his friend, deal with his own grief, and help others going through a hard time. He decided to volunteer at Lines for Life, a nonprofit crisis-line organization in Portland, Oregon.
Just a few months into his time there, Mr. Harrison took a call from a teenager who was thinking about walking in front of the next train. “It was really brave of you to reach out,” he told the caller. The teenager eventually decided the library was the safest place for him to go, and Mr. Harrison stayed on the phone with him while he took the bus there.
Mr. Harrison, who is now 23, later joined the staff at YouthLine, a service that Lines for Life offers for those aged 11 to 21. He said he dreams of discovering what that caller went on to accomplish.
Youth suicide is climbing faster than suicide by any other age group, perhaps because of social media, which can cause rising anxiety and depression among teenagers. While peer support has proved effective for adults with mental health challenges, scientific evaluations of teenagers helping one another are difficult to find — even though some limited studies show that teenagers experiencing the stress of adolescence cope better emotionally when they are with their friends than with their parents. YouthLine is one of six youth lines across the country that have demonstrated how teenagers can relate to their peers over the internet or the phone in a way that adults are sometimes unable to do.
These peer-run crisis lines are coming together to bring more young voices to crisis intervention. But to spread this service nationwide, they will have to convince the skeptics that teenagers can do this work.
The Op-Ed continues:
But not everyone thinks teenagers can or should take calls from people in crisis.
Crisis Text Line, a nonprofit that provides crisis intervention by text, decided to steer clear of volunteers under the age of 18 for a few reasons, according to Dr. Shairi Turner, who was the first chief medical officer at the organization. She said she is concerned that conversations with people in crisis “run the risk of vicarious trauma” for teenage volunteers.
Wendy Farmer, the chief executive of Behavioral Health Link in Atlanta, also had reservations about the model, until she visited Lines for Life last August. “The clinician in me said, ‘Wow, it’s a great idea, but I don’t know if we want to expose young people to what happens on a crisis line,’” she said.
Initially, Ms. Farmer traveled to Portland to learn how the adults who run her lines could better relate to teenagers or preteens. But she said she was “really blown away” by the young people she met. Ms. Farmer went through the YouthLine orientation, spent a night on shift and conducted a focus group with some of the volunteers. She said she was struck by how smart the students were — indeed, she said, the 15-year-old she was paired with for an exercise in reflective listening did a better job than she did.
Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
Are adults a good source for advice because of their life experience and knowledge? Or do you see them as out of touch, patronizing or judgmental? Do you relate better to your peers, or do you see them as naïve and immature?
Would you ever want to work as a teenage counselor? Would you worry about experiencing “vicarious trauma”? Or that you might be ill equipped to intervene if someone came to you with serious issues involving self-harm, for example, or abuse? How important is it for people in crisis to have someone just to listen to them?
Students 13 and older are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public.
