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.

But it has also proved a lifeline for young people who may be geographically close to potential sources of face-to-face support, but still feel too isolated from them to approach them for help.

A study published by the service yesterday found the internet and friends were the most likely places young people turned to for help when going through a tough time.

Fewer than a quarter (24%) said they would approach a parent, fewer than one in 10 (9%) would talk to a teacher and fewer than one-third (32%) would attend a health professional. The study also found that of those that had sought professional help for a mental health issue, 41% would not do so again.

Minister of State with Responsibility for Mental Health, Kathleen Lynch, who launched the study, said this finding warranted further investigation. “We need to take a look at that. That would worry me,” said Ms Lynch.

The minister praised ReachOut for helping to normalise discussion of mental health. “We don’t have a problem in talking about cancer now but in the past we never named it because we were afraid of it. Now we know what it is, we know how it develops and we know how to treat it and we don’t have that fear of talking about it.

“We have to start talking about mental health in the same way and bring it out of the dark and I think the internet can bring it out of the dark. We have started a conversation about it and if we can keep this conversation going we will normalise mental health. We will talk about it in the same way as we talk about whole body health.”

The study found that while 91% of young people believed that anyone could experience mental health problems, 59% would not want anyone else to know if they were the person experiencing the mental health problem.

Derek Chambers of ReachOut said a recurring remark by the young people was that discussion of mental health was reactive rather than proactive. “They felt it was talked about when something happened, like a suicide in the community, rather than as an everyday issue.”

lThe www.reachout.com web address automatically defaults to the Irish site when accessed from Ireland. The Australian and US versions can be found at http://au.reachout.com and http://us.reachout.com.