Online mental health service gets 3,000 hits a week

AN ONLINE mental health service supporting young people through tough times is getting 3,000 visits a week despite only setting up last year.

ReachOut.com offers information, advice, contact lists and questions and answer sessions with health professionals for teens and young people weighed down by anything from stress, depression and relationship or money troubles to addiction concerns and suspected psychiatric illness.

The website, set up in January 2010 by the charitable foundation, Inspire Ireland, is an Irish version of an international service that began in Australia as an attempt to reach out to young people who were physically isolated from help in that country’s vast rural regions.