After a difficult period through the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects it had on youth, Wes For Youth Online Marketing and Communications Coordinator, Jordyn O’Connor, said overall, youth are starting to resume their lives.
She said going back to a somewhat regular school routine has helped.
“We are seeing that youth are coping a little bit better in 2022 than when schools were closed and everything like that with COVID,” O’Connor stated.
While the pandemic didn’t necessarily force Wes For Youth to change their service as they were already online, they have changed their structure with a new platform being soft launched.
“So before with asynchronous email-to-email and live chat, now we’re offering video calling and phone calling, and we’re offering some unique options for kids who are more likely to be artistic or express themselves differently,” shared O’Connor. “So we have a creative submissions centre where youth can update writings, or music, or anything they think will communicate with their counsellor better how they’re feeling, and really all these options came from discussions with youth that we were able to have over the past few months.”
With ever expanding services, O’Connor said it is important to gauge what the youth want and how they want to interact with the WesForYouthOnline.ca platform and all it can offer.
“Listening to what they wanted and how we could best serve them, so all of this has been really exciting. We just did a soft launch, so all of our youth that are currently using our service have switched over, and we’ll be doing a hard launch in the new year,” O’Connor said.
In terms of uptick in youth utilizing the service during the pandemic, O’Connor said they definitely saw that, for a variety of factors. That included being more isolated, losing the regular school life routines, as well as new internal pressures of living at home potentially, as well.
“Living in your house with your family all the time can bring a lot of new issues. Also, like I mentioned, just not having the outside access to resources, so, a lot of youth turned to us, because there was simply not a lot of options for them,” O’Connor said.
As of January 2020, O’Connor said there were as many as 28,000 youth on wait lists for mental health services. She said all of the organizations out there, be it private, public, non-profit and corporate, a lot of them are directed towards crisis counselling, and WesForYouthOnline differs from that.
“We offer ongoing counselling because we believe that many of the issues that youth are facing can’t be resolved at the level they need to in order to ensure that youth mental health continues to get better,” O’Connor added.
She also said crisis counselling and short-term counselling can be very needed and important, and she and WesForYouth aren’t suggesting otherwise, but they take a bit more of a proactive measure.
“We want youth to already have access to resources and already have the coping skills before they get to a point where they are incredibly distressed,” O’Connor noted. “Ongoing care, we believe, is the future of better mental health for Ontario youth.”
WesForYouthOnline will also be launching a new phone app in 2023. For more information, visit http://wesforyouthonline.ca/.
