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    Insights

    Welcome to Kids Help Phone Insights! Here, you can navigate anonymous (i.e. without personal or identifying details) and aggregated (i.e. not individual) data from the conversations we have with young people across Canada 24/7.

    Start your journey with Kids Help Phone Insights below!

    About Kids Help Phone Insights

    Through Kids Help Phone Insights, we want to remind kids, teens and young adults across Canada that you’re never alone. Reaching out takes courage, and it can be comforting to know you’re not going through something on your own. The maps and charts below can act as your compass and point you to how our counsellors and crisis responders are here to help with any issue on your mind, big or small.

    To anyone else visiting this page, we want to share our learnings with you from the frontlines of youth mental health and well-being in Canada. Although young people’s strengths and struggles are much more than a data point, we hope you can use the information on this platform to help shape your policies, programs and more. We’d love to connect with you, too ⁠— just contact us!

    blockquoteYoung people, no matter how mature they seem, need guidance, and support, and love, and understanding.

    — Service user, aged 18-20

    blockquoteSometimes all we need is for someone to stand there and say "I'm here for you, and I support you."

    — Service user, aged 18-20

    blockquoteThere's times when we're genuinely hurting inside and it doesn't help when it's dismissed.

    — Service user, aged 13 or younger

    Where are young people
    contacting Kids Help Phone from?

    Young people from every province and territory in Canada reach out to us every single day. The data in the chart below is pulled from the conversations we have via our phone and texting services. You can take a tour through what young people are talking about in communities from coast to coast to coast by tapping on any province or territory below. Once a territory or province is selected, you can also hold command or control on your keyboard to additionally filter by age range or issue.

    This data is only available in Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

    What issues are young people contacting Kids Help Phone about?

    Have you ever wondered what youth are reaching out to us about? The data in the charts below is pulled from the conversations we have across Canada via our texting service. You can dive deeper into the issues young people are talking to our crisis responders about right now by selecting a topic from the list below. Once a topic is selected, you can also hold command or control on your keyboard to additionally filter by age range, day of week or time of day.

    This data is only available in Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

    How are young people
    feeling after contacting Kids Help Phone?

    Sharing what’s going on for you with someone you trust can really help — that’s why Kids Help Phone is always there. But how do youth feel after asking for the support they need? The data in the chart below is pulled from our texting service (reflecting 50% of our overall demand), and captures how youth are feeling after their conversation. You can discover young people’s responses below!

    blockquoteNo matter your issue. Big or small, if it's an issue to you it’s okay to feel that and take steps towards fixing it. Sometimes everyone just needs a little help.

    — Service user, aged 18-20

    blockquoteYou are valid. Your sadness is valid. Your happiness is valid. Don't let others decide how valid you are.

    — Service user, aged 14

    blockquoteIt is scary to first reach out, but once you do you will not regret it. Life can get better.

    — Service user, aged 18-20

    This data is only available in Chrome, Firefox and Edge.

    READ FAQ

    Kids Help Phone is Canada’s only 24/7 e-mental health service offering free, confidential support in English and French to young people. As the country’s virtual care expert, we give millions of youth a safe, trusted space to talk in any moment of crisis or need. Whether by phone, text, mobile app or online platform, youth can connect with us whenever they want, however they want.

    Insights is our platform to share data from the stories, conversations and support we provide to young people across Canada every day.

    For young people, we want to share a reminder that they’re never alone. No issue is too big or too small, and in fact, hundreds of other young people share some of the same thoughts and feelings.

    For anyone else, we want to share learnings from our data. We hope to help guide services, programs, policies and systems with the information we have and help ensure strong, responsive and evidence-based support for young people in Canada.

    Each and every day, we hear from hundreds of youth in Canada in their moments of need. Over phone, text and instant message, we continuously learn what young people are struggling with, the fears they have, the pain they’re experiencing and, most importantly, what brings them hope. We’re the largest frontline serving young people across Canada, and all of the data presented on this web page comes directly from our services.

    Data presented on Insights comes from our operational and monitoring data (e.g. service volumes, etc.), counsellor and crisis responder logs of the issues discussed in conversations and opt-in surveys that are scrubbed of any identifying information. For more information on our data collection and analysis, please feel free to contact us.

    All quotes presented on Insights are from the open-ended questions we ask on our post-conversation surveys. Any quotes presented here are shared only after receiving explicit permission.

    Respecting young people’s privacy is important to us. We want to reassure them that their conversation with us is confidential. This means our counsellors and crisis responders will not share their information with anyone outside of Kids Help Phone, unless they’re worried about their safety.

    We never share data or information from individual conversations. Any data shared publicly (e.g. on this web page or in external reports, etc.) is always aggregated and anonymous. This means it’s an overview of all of our conversations and services and doesn’t describe any individuals or offer any identifying information. To learn more, you can visit:

    Insights has been reviewed by a third-party Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). To view a copy of this assessment, please contact us.

    We welcome data collaborations, but our Terms of Use is that any public use (e.g. in media or public reporting, etc.) of the data we own on this page requires written permission from Kids Help Phone. If you’re looking to present any of our data publicly, please contact us to request permission.

    The data presented on Insights is only a snapshot of the full datasets we have at Kids Help Phone. We’re very interested in creating partnerships with anyone who may benefit from access to more of the data that we have. If you’re interested in working with us to pull more learnings, insights and guidance from our service data, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact us to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

    We’re at the forefront of leveraging data and AI to shape the future of youth mental health in Canada, but we need partners to help us bring our impact to scale for the millions of young people from coast to coast to coast. By supporting our innovation and data work, you can help to inform proactive programming and public policy, transform how we use and share data and drive new digital technologies that meet kids where they’re at. Whether you’re an organization or an individual, there are many ways for you to get involved.

    Please contact us to learn more and discuss ways to engage in this transformational work!

    We’d be thrilled to work with you to share stories from our data in the media! Please note that our Terms of Use is that any public use of our data requires written permission from Kids Help Phone. For more information, to request permission or to book an interview with us, please contact us.

    Insights is a new initiative at Kids Help Phone in 2020, and we’re eager to hear what you think. If you have feedback for us or ideas for our data work, please fill out our short feedback survey. Thank you for sharing your ideas!