Being a teenager has never been easy. It is a time of great change and transition in one's life. Teenagers' bodies are rapidly maturing, and their brains are still learning how to regulate their emotions. They experience many firsts during this time, including first loves, first jobs and first breakups, all of which can be stressful. Today’s teenagers face the additional challenge of the pandemic having disrupted their formative years, heightening feelings of isolation and hopelessness. When the world is scary and overwhelming, teenagers can find comfort and hope when connecting with their peers.
YouthLine, a teen-to-teen crisis and help line run by Lines for Life, can help teens find peer support and connection. Lines for Life is a regional nonprofit dedicated to preventing substance abuse and suicide. It operates several crisis lines where people can call, text or chat with peers who have been trained to help them. In 2021 Lines for Life received nearly 170,000 calls on their crisis lines. Their services offer help and hope to individuals and communities, as well as promote mental health for all. YouthLine encourages teenagers to talk about whatever is bothering them; no problem is too large or too minor.
The Cambia Health Foundation has provided funding to Lines for Life and YouthLine over the years. This is aligned with the Foundation’s new strategy, which focuses on expanding access to behavioral health in underserved communities. Behavioral health is a pressing community need and includes mental health and substance addiction care, as well as a continuum of prevention, intervention, treatment and recovery support services.
In this episode of HealthChangers, Andree Miceli, Cambia Health Solutions' clinical director of behavioral health, speaks with Dwight Holton, CEO of Lines for Life, and Emily Moser, director of Lines for Life's YouthLine program. The group highlights YouthLine's critical work including the positive impact YouthLine has on the teens who are trained to receive the calls. They also discuss the new 988 emergency phone number for mental health crises that will go live in July 2022, and how Lines for Life and YouthLine are expanding nationally. The episode concludes with reflections from Peggy Maguire, president of the Cambia Health Foundation.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline provides 24/7, free and confidential support for people in distress, prevention and crisis resources for you or your loved ones, and best practices for professionals in the United States. Call (800) 273-TALK (8255). Starting July 16, 2022, you can also call, text or chat 988, the new national dialing code.
Transcript
Rachel Day (RD): Welcome to the HealthChangers podcast presented by Cambia Health Solutions where we share real stories of health care transformation from those experiencing it and those helping to make health care more personalized. I'm your host, Rachel.
Young people today are experiencing an alarming increase in mental health challenges. According to the U.S. Surgeon General in the past decade, the number of high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness increased by 40%. And those seriously considering attempting suicide increased by 36%. The wide-ranging effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have made matters worse. Today on HealthChangers, we'll talk with an organization that's on the forefront of responding to the mental health crisis among youth.
Lines for Life is a nonprofit that's dedicated to preventing substance abuse and suicide. We'll hear from Dwight Holton, its CEO, and Emily Moser, director of the YouthLine program at Lines for Life. Our conversation is hosted by Andree Miceli, the clinical director of behavioral health for Cambia.
Andree Miceli (AM): Welcome, Dwight and Emily. It's so great to have you here and be recording this podcast with you on this really, really crucial topic. Can you start out by telling us about Lines for Life and what your organization does?
Dwight Holton (DH): Sure. Lines for Life is a nonprofit dedicated to preventing substance abuse and suicide and promoting mental wellness. We do three things to meet that mission really well. First, we do crisis intervention and that looks mostly like answering crisis calls, texts, chats from over 160,000 people a year. Second, we do prevention work and that's both systemic prevention as well as prevention in schools. And then third and finally, we do policy and advocacy around suicide prevention and substance abuse prevention.
AM: That is wonderful and it's such important work. And I really like to hear what you're doing in schools because I think the prevention aspect is something in behavioral health that very often isn't given enough airtime. The landscape of behavioral health with kids has definitely changed over the last few years. It's becoming more and more prevalent. There's been an increase in over 40% of high school students reporting sadness and feelings of depression, an increase in outpatient utilization, going to outpatient mental health, an increase in hospitalizations, suicide attempts, suicidal rates, all the things that we don't want to see. What is Lines for Life doing to help combat this?
“Our YouthLine is a teen-to-teen crisis service that uses close to 200 youth volunteers who are highly trained to answer crisis calls, texts, and chats from their peers.”
DH: Well, we have a number of initiatives that we run at Lines for Life targeted specifically around youth mental health. But the centerpiece is really our YouthLine. Our YouthLine is a teen-to-teen crisis service that uses close to 200 youth volunteers who are highly trained to answer crisis calls, texts and chats from their peers. And there's nothing more effective and there's nobody better to talk about it than my colleague, Emily Moser, who runs our YouthLine.
Emily Moser (EM): Thank you. I'm happy to talk about YouthLine in a little bit more detail. Like our parent organization, Lines for Life, the work that we do on the YouthLine really has three different components. One is very specific to the work that we do through crisis intervention and support of teens and young adults.
As Dwight said, we do work with anywhere between 160 to 200 volunteers that range in age from 15 to 22 years old and they're highly trained. They go through 65+ hours of training that includes certification in some of the hallmark training around suicide intervention and mental health. It includes safeTALK, which is youth mental health first aid. And for many of our young volunteers, it includes assist training, which is the hallmark of suicide intervention training.
They also, because of the nature of the work that we do on the lines, learn a lot about how to take care of themselves and self-care and communicating with not only folks on the lines, but their peers in the school setting as well as in a crisis intervention setting. On the lines themselves, we take contacts via phone call, text, chat and email. The issues range in complexity – starting on the simpler side where we're looking at issues that folks are calling us that have to do with what we might consider regular teenage stress or more in the norm of what happens on a day-to-day basis. What's going on at school, maybe relationship issues with your family and/or your peers, and work to help normalize whatever it is that you're feeling.
And then [we] move into a place of problem-solving and working together to come up with some solutions around reaching out for additional help.
And then [we] move into a place of problem-solving and working together to come up with some solutions around reaching out for additional help. It can be very complicated because we do talk to teenagers who are feeling some of the things that you mentioned earlier around feeling depression, anxiety, isolation, loneliness. Some of these are a function of COVID and some of them just quite frankly have existed for quite some time.
Our teens are also trained to be able to actively listen to young people and normalize what it is that they're feeling…
Our teens are also trained to be able to actively listen to young people and normalize what it is that they're feeling, partly because it's their peers and they can quite frankly understand and relate to what some of those feelings are and what some of those emotions might be or how some of those emotions might be impacting day-to-day life. We do take context from individuals who are experiencing suicidal ideation, and we do sit with them in that moment to help problem solve and troubleshoot and put self-care and safety plans in place so the young people who call us can get the help they need from the resources that they identify in and around their own community.
AM: Something that I've seen in my career is the significant impact that economic and social barriers play in mental health, whether it's stigma or access to resources or even just seeking out help and acknowledging that you may need help. Are there things that you do to address those economic and social barriers?
DH: Yeah, it's a super important point and straight off, the first part of the answer is what we do is a free service that we provide to anybody, and we are reaching more and more people, more and more young people every year with the YouthLine. I think 10 to 11 years ago, we were talking to maybe a thousand kids and had nine student volunteers. Last year, we talked to more than 25,000 kids in all 50 states. We're open and available for folks obviously without regard to cost.
Last year, we talked to more than 25,000 kids in all 50 states. We're open and available for folks obviously without regard to cost.
Emily and the team have launched our really innovative program to support volunteers from communities where volunteering might be a little harder, where the financial barriers are either because of transportation or because there are other things going on in the house; where the kid needs a job or some form of income in order to support the household. We've created a fellowship program where students can actually get a stipend to work on the YouthLine. And this is part of our effort to help diversify and reach broader communities than we've been able to reach in the past, not just with the service but with the experience of being a YouthLine volunteer, which is so incredibly enriching.
We are launching a satellite in connection with the Warm Springs reservation, really excited about that. We'll also be launching a satellite in East Portland or East County sometime in the next year to bring the service to broader communities and reach further communities.
We've created a fellowship program where students can actually get a stipend to work on the YouthLine. This is part of our effort to help diversify and reach broader communities than we've been able to reach in the past, not just with the service but with the experience of being a YouthLine volunteer, which is so incredibly enriching.
AM: It sounds like no matter what someone's economic status or social status is, Lines for Life is for everybody. You can meet everyone's needs where they are and that's one point that we really want to bring home—the doors aren't closed to anybody.
DH: That's absolutely right. I'll say a really important part of what we've been working on especially hard the last couple of years is building not just a diverse workforce and a diverse set of teenagers and young people to work on the YouthLine, but also building cultural responsivity into what they do. It's something the YouthLine has been a pioneer on, but we're also working on it with the rest of our counseling staff as well.
AM: Wonderful, wonderful. And I know the social worker in me…I've learned very early on that cultural aspects are so important to take into consideration when someone does or does not need services because we don't want to do anything, or suggest anything that would go against what their cultural norms are. So that's great to hear. Social media has blown up thanks to COVID-19 even more than it was already – it was already huge. Especially with teens. They live and breathe social media, which can be a good thing, but it can also be a dangerous thing. How has that impacted your work and/or is Lines for Life doing anything specifically addressing the effects of social media on kids and depression?
EM: The two most important things that I would say is that because we are a youth development/youth advocacy program that we work with the volunteers that work with us to advise us and to guide us in how we manage our own social media. We have our own Instagram and we have a Facebook page and a lot of the messaging that we do around that is guided and there's a lot of input from the youth as to what and how that looks.
We use it in such a way really to send messages around hope and destigmatization, help and recovery. Again, I go back to the normalizing the help-seeking behavior, normalizing this idea that it's okay not to be okay. It's meant to be sort of on a peer-to-peer type platform. Our youth are using that platform with the help of the adults who work on our staff to send these messages that help normalize and again offer hope.
I think part of what you're asking me though, too, is the negative aspects of social media and what we're doing to combat that. I think it's really around education and awareness across the board. That's knowing and understanding. It's very interesting because depending upon which youth you're talking to, the response that you will get, and I think Dwight would probably echo this being the father of teenagers, that if you have an awareness and if you have an understanding where the young person is being critical about what they're seeing and learning and how they're using social media, that we have youth that will come back to us and say, “Yes, it's all a good thing. It's just a matter of how you actually engage. And then how do you turn it off? How do you set it aside when you need to?”
That's a super challenging piece to work with. It goes back to education. It goes back to just like 10 years ago when we were talking about advertising. What does it mean to be a critical thinker about advertising? It's the same thing. What does it mean to be a critical thinker about how you're using social media? In the classroom, we can address that, and we definitely address that with the 200 volunteers who we have working on YouthLine.
DH: Emily, can you talk a little bit also about our effort to support folks on social media, our affirmative effort to identify folks who are struggling and give them a hand.
EM: Yeah, thank you. We do also have an additional program that is part of the YouthLine program, where we have determined that this social media can be a very challenging place for young people to express some of these unhealthy coping mechanisms in such a way where they don't get the help that they need. They're just emoting on social media. We have created a program called Safe Social Spaces, where we have crisis intervention specialists who are reaching out to young people on social media and just talking to them, expressing concern for whatever they have been posting and offering resources, offering to problem solve, offering to sit with them in that moment; to move them to a place where they are actually reaching out for help in a way where they're talking to somebody on a crisis line or they're getting a resource that can help them move forward.
We have created a program called Safe Social Spaces, where we have crisis intervention specialists that are reaching out to young people on social media and just talking to them, expressing concern for whatever they have been posting and offering resources, offering to problem solve, offering to sit with them in that moment…
AM: Social media definitely isn't going anywhere, so we have to use it to our advantage and take the positives from it and how it can help us with these efforts. Shifting a little bit, we know that kids are not just small adults, that their brains are different, their thoughts and feelings are different, they're still forming who they are and want to be. How does crisis look different between a youth and an adult and how should our responses to those crises be different?
DH: I want Emily to answer this but let me just answer it first from a non-clinical perspective because I'm not a clinician, I'm just a lawyer. One of the most interesting things and impactful things that Emily and the team have taught me is that the stresses kids face from grades, from relationships, from peer pressure are physiologically identical to the stresses I feel about making my mortgage payment or making payroll. The difference is I have 56 years of coping skills.
…the stresses kids face from grades, from relationships, from peer pressure are physiologically identical to the stresses I feel about making my mortgage payment or making payroll.
This comes back to something you said earlier if we can reach kids with the lower-grade challenges. They're calling us because they don't know how to tell mom they failed a math test or because their significant other broke up with them. If we can reach them for those lower-grade challenges, help them develop those coping skills, those positive help-seeking skills, where they're willing to reach out to adults; if we can do that in the less acute setting, we hopefully won't see them later in the more acute setting.
EM: Yeah. Thank you, Dwight. And that's really important, to just reemphasize that it doesn't really matter on the YouthLine or in the work that we do in the schools. It doesn't really matter why you're calling us or why you're contacting us. If you're experiencing crisis because of it, then we're going to sit with you and work through whatever challenges are related to that. I would say that what that does look like sometimes is on that lower-acuity scale around maybe it's the first time ever that you have been in a breakup and you're experiencing emotions around grief that you've never felt before. Being able to have conversation about that (and again I go back to the word normalizing) that feeling what you feel in this particular example around grief is a hundred percent normal and we're okay sitting with you while you're talking about it, which is different sometimes from when an adult is working with a young person.
It doesn't really matter why you're calling us or why you're contacting us. If you're experiencing crisis because of it, then we're going to sit with you and work through whatever challenges are related to that.
I've done it. I'll be the first to say that even with my own children I could be the person that is like, “Oh, you're going to be okay. You're going to be in a lot of relationships.” And in a lot of ways, that is incredibly not helpful. What our team does and what our youth do is…there isn't any judgment. There aren’t any opinions. There isn't any advice around whatever it is you're feeling – it's about sitting in the moment, regardless of whether it's something related to tests and school, grief and loss around a relationship, an argument with your parents, all the way down to sometimes what we see around suicidal ideation and self-harm.
I think the other piece that's super important about some of the differences are, is that we have youth who are contacting us, that we believe for the very first time they've ever reached out for help to anybody ever about something that feels super uncomfortable. Oftentimes the conversations, even though we are a crisis support and helpline, the conversations don't start with, "I need help." Or they don't start with, "I'm feeling suicidal." Which is on some of the other lines you can assume if they're calling the lifeline, the suicide lifeline, that this person is really in a place where they might be experiencing some suicidal ideation. On the YouthLine that might be true, but we oftentimes work through a timeframe where the conversation literally starts, "Hey." "Hey." "How's it going?" "Good." "How are you?" They're testing the waters around what it means to be reaching out and talking to a peer in this type of a setting. What presents is something like I'm having a hard time at school. After an extended conversation, come to find out that potentially a youth is being bullied at school and is experiencing suicidal ideation because of it. But oftentimes the conversations don't start that way.
AM: I think it's perception. It's what's a crisis or stressful to me may not be to you. It's how one perceives an event, so you're absolutely spot on. We can never minimize or say someone's feelings or response to something is wrong. It is what it is, and we go from there. It always amazes me when adults don't think kids have stress because they don't have jobs and they're not supporting a family. Stress is stress and it's there. So, it's great that it sounds like what you're doing with the line and the volunteers is absolutely incredible. Just listening and being there and saying it's okay. And developing that relationship and the rapport over the phone so that they can eventually open up a little more.
EM: I'm really glad that you point that out because that is like the first step to being able to get to a place where you can start thinking about self-care, you can start thinking about safety plans, you can start working towards identifying the trusted adults and other resources that are actually within your safety net and work towards getting the help that you need over the course of time. And just the whole idea of being able to work with young people, to help them understand that you can get help and it's okay to get help. Oh, and by the way, let's work through a pathway that means that this is what's going to work for you.
Then one of the unique things about what we do also on the YouthLine is that we ask young people if we can check back in with them. We do follow-up contacts as well. If we make a safety plan or a self-care plan that includes reaching out to a school counselor the next day, we can call them back and ask them how that went. If it didn't go like it was supposed to, or they didn't do it for some reason, then we can sit with them again and practice and think through: If this isn't the right way to do it, what is? We stick with them until they're ready for us to, or they've moved on, I guess is the best way to put it.
…we ask young people if we can check back in with them. We do follow-up contacts as well. If we make a safety plan or a self-care plan that includes reaching out to a school counselor the next day, we can call them back and ask them how that went.
DH: And it's a unique feature of text, that the conversation kind of never ends, right? It doesn't have to have an endpoint, where we do with calls. We call people back, but it's not the same. It's worth noting that the majority of our contacts with the youth now are by text. In fact, the youth are there from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. every day. We see young people who are reaching out to us wait until then to reach out. If you reach out outside that time, you'll get a text back saying, if you need immediate help, here's who to call, but otherwise, we'll get back to you tomorrow. It's really interesting that young people seem to have figured that out and that's when they come to us.
AM: I have a long history in managed care and behavioral health going back to 2005. I've seen a shift over the years with kids and seeking higher level of care, inpatient hospitalization, residential treatment. Early on it was a lot of behavioral issues and families wanting help with behavioral issues, but we've definitely seen an increase in admissions with kids and more depression, more suicide attempts, more suicidal ideation, things around school bullying, admissions for suicidality around school bullying really blossomed sadly several years ago.
It goes back to our earlier points about the increase in feelings of sadness and depression amongst kids and teens. You reference the work in the schools and early intervention, which is great. Are there any other things that Lines for Life is doing to try to prevent and help the families with their kids providing other resources before they get to the point where they need a hospitalization? With the goal being, we want to keep kids safely in their homes with their families.
EM: Yes. I think that we could talk a little bit about some of the additional work that we do in the schools. We have a team of coordinators that work regionally around the state and are working with schools to develop out their school suicide prevention, intervention and postvention policy, which is really this big umbrella around mental health and wellness.
As we know, youth spend the majority of their time at school and at home. Those are the two places where they spend the most time. By working with administrators and health teachers and counselors to develop a comprehensive plan, that means that in a school setting, that curriculum is being addressed, intervention procedures and policies and protocols are laid out in a way that means everybody knows how you manage a youth who is experiencing some of the challenges that you just talked about.
On the YouthLine, we deescalate anywhere from 97 to 98% of the contacts on a regular basis.
As a part of that, what does it mean to engage family in those conversations? It's challenging for sure. Between the work that we do on the YouthLine and the work that we're doing in schools, I think that we're impacting a high number of students. And there's still that challenge. On the YouthLine, we deescalate anywhere from 97 to 98% of the contacts on a regular basis. There's still that 2% that we are working on looking at what those different levels of care are and working with partners like the Oregon Health & Science University, specifically to work through how we improve the system, particularly as we move towards 988.
AM: Emily, you mentioned 988. Could you please tell us a little bit more about that for people who aren't familiar?
EM: Sure. I'm happy to. 988 is the new emergency number equivalent to 911 for behavioral health response. This is something that will be rolled out nationally in July and will be a number that is available for folks who are experiencing a mental health emergency or a mental health crisis and will have a direct number to reach out to get the support that they need.
988 is the new emergency number equivalent to 911 for behavioral health response.
AM: I would love to hear from you both about a story, and I know our audience would love to hear a real-life story of how Lines for Life has impacted someone's life.
EM: On the line itself, we have had youths that have reached out, and I can't tell a detailed, specific story, but I can say that we have had youth who have reached out, who started the conversation, with this particular case, by talking about wanting to change her makeup. She was going to school and was worried about changing her look, and her parents were very upset about the fact that she wanted to use makeup in a different sort of way.
We sat with her through that, just thinking through makeup, what does that look like? What does that feel like? And came to the point where we realized that the reason why she wanted to change that was she was being teased and bullied at school regarding her look. And that her parents had some religious beliefs that meant that maybe they didn't approve of the changes she was making.
And all of that built into some thoughts and some suicidal ideation. We were able to have the conversation up to the point where we understood that at this point in time, that she was actually thinking about taking her own life as a result of these challenges and worked through what it might look like to talk to her parents about the bullying, talk to some counselors at school about the bullying and have an action plan to be able to do that and move her away from that feeling of hopelessness. That's an impactful story where at the end of the day, she basically said to us that if we weren't there, that she might not be here either to be able to help work through that.
We were able to have the conversation up to the point where we understood that at this point in time, that she was actually thinking about taking her own life as a result of these challenges and worked through what it might look like to talk to her parents about the bullying, talk to some counselors at school about the bullying and have an action plan to be able to do that and move her away from that feeling of hopelessness.
Then I also want to talk a little bit about our youth development program, the teenagers and the young adults who work for us on a regular basis, will tell us that by volunteering on YouthLine it changed their life. The confidence that they gained and the communication skills that they gain and that the skills, not necessarily around empathy, but understanding that the feelings of others are complicated. And then having the skillset to be able to communicate really are skills that they will use throughout the rest of their life.
DH: Well, let me add also, I think this is a really important lesson we're learning in our satellite office in Central Oregon. We were very deliberate in Central Oregon…and I'm going to tell you the punchline, this is about workforce, and we are dying in the behavioral health community with workforce. It's been a remarkable crisis. It's been exacerbated by the pandemic where people are burning out and leaving the field. And because of student loan debt, they can't afford to stay in the field.
We've learned this incredible thing with our office in Central Oregon, where we made a real point of prioritizing kids from the rural communities in Deschutes, Jefferson and Crook counties. Some of the young people who've come to volunteer with us are folks for whom college felt like a stretch, but our satellite office is there on the Oregon State University-Cascades campus. These kids are coming and owning a part of that campus every week. They're working with faculty and students from that campus every week. All of a sudden, the college feels like not only something they can do but something they will do. They'll own, they'll get a skill that makes them employable in their own communities at a decent pay. It is really exciting to be seeing this pipeline of workforce develop for these remarkable young people who we're working with.
AM: These stories are amazing. I get so excited hearing it. You're not just helping…Lines for Life doesn't just help the patient, but the people who serve. Now we have a whole budding field of therapists who already have a leg up because they've already done some of the work. This is so exciting. From our conversation, I know Lines for Life has done and continues to do some amazing things in our community. Can you give us any sneak peeks about anything that might be evolving or how you're planning to grow and continue this great work?
We started it as an Oregon service…but for at least five years now, we've been talking to young people in all 50 states. It's grown to the point that when you map it, you can see we are really heavily involved in all 50 states in the union.
DH: Well, we sure can. We've got great stuff going on. First and foremost, the reality is, and we realized a couple of years ago that this is a national service. We started it as an Oregon service, we've always targeted Oregon as our audience, if you will, but for at least five years now, we've been talking to young people in all 50 states. It's grown to the point that when you map it, you can see we are really heavily involved in all 50 states in the union.
The next step for YouthLine is to recognize it as a national service and grow it as a national service. We've just been given some investment from the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration to begin that process. Last week, the Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra was at Lines for Life. He visited with YouthLine volunteers. And I told him when we get to the State of the Union next year, I'm really looking forward to hearing President Biden call on a YouthLine volunteer in the gallery of the United States Congress, as he announces his commitment to a national YouthLine.
We're really excited about that, but we're also really excited about the work we're doing with tribal communities and our partnership with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. I think that has real potential to grow into a national tribal peer YouthLine. Stay tuned on that. We're working on that.
AM: This has been so much fun, getting to know more about the program, getting to know you both more. I thank you Dwight and Emily for your time today. I hope through this conversation more people take advantage of Lines for Life and YouthLine so that you're even busier than you are today. And ultimately, we are saving lives and really doing great work in the community. So really appreciate this information.
DH: Thank you so much. We appreciate it.
EM: Thank you.
Rachel Day (RD): Before we wrap up this episode of HealthChangers, we asked Peggy Maguire, president of Cambia Health Foundation, to share a reflection on the episode and what she heard. Take a listen.
Peggy Maguire (PM): Wow. The passion that I'm hearing on this topic from Dwight, Emily and Andree is absolutely contagious. My name is Peggy Maguire, and I'm the president of the Cambia Health Foundation. We are the corporate foundation of Cambia Health Solutions. Lines for Life has been a long-time community partner of ours and it has been such an honor to work with them and learn from them along the way.
A few years ago, we invested in Lines for Life to help launch their YouthLine, which we just heard about on the episode. We invested in this because the concept of neighbor helping neighbor deeply resonated with us. Peer-to-peer mental health support is an expression of neighbor helping neighbor - the principle upon which our parent company was founded more than a hundred years ago. The need for better behavioral health support was an issue before the pandemic, but it's an even greater issue now because of all of the uncertainty caused by the pandemic and other social issues.
We have to make it okay for people to ask for help.
Sometimes I say, it was bubbling before the pandemic but now it's reached a boil. The information that was included in this discussion was so important, but for me, a key takeaway is that it's crucial to remove the stigma around mental health care. We have to make it okay for people to ask for help. Think about it. You go to the doctor if you have a sore throat. You shouldn't hesitate to reach out to a therapist if you're feeling anxious or depressed, and sooner is definitely better than later. Sometimes talking to a peer is enough to make you feel better. It's not only okay to ask for help, but I'd love to see us get to a point where asking for help can be celebrated.
Over the next five years, the Cambia Health Foundation is committed to expanding access to behavioral health resources in underserved communities. I'm deeply appreciative for the impact that Lines for Life is making in our communities, and especially for the peer-to-peer work that builds resiliency in youth. And I'm so inspired by the teens who volunteer their time to answer calls with the YouthLine.
Over the next five years, the Cambia Health Foundation is committed to expanding access to behavioral health resources in underserved communities.
The amount of training that they go through is impressive. And even though the work is serious, it's amazing to hear their energy, empowerment and the fulfillment that these teens garner from the experience. As humans, we are wired to connect with each other. So many, many thanks to Dwight, Emily and Andree for sharing their insights. The difference that Lines for Life is making in our community is truly inspiring. We're grateful.
As humans, we are wired to connect with each other.
RD: And that wraps up this episode of HealthChangers. You can find more information on all of our episodes at cambiahealth.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @Cambia C-A-M-B-I-A. You can now find HealthChangers on all of your favorite platforms, just search for HealthChangers on platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Play. Please subscribe and leave a review. Thanks for listening.
