When it comes to mental health support, kids around the world are taking steps to ensure that they have each other’s backs.
In Karnataka, India, the state’s first Child Rights Club started a “beacon buddies” program, where classmates can learn to detect early signs of distress in their peers and extend words of support.
In Australia, the Peers for Teens and Young Adults program pairs young adults with autism together for four months to help them build confidence and develop their social skills.
And every night in Los Angeles, from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., a revolving group of teenagers provides vital support to people their age — just by picking up the phone.
“A lot of people, when they hear Teen Line, or ‘Hotline,’ they think, ‘suicide call, crisis call,’” Brooke, a 16-year-old Teen Line volunteer, told NBC News. “But so many of my calls have been about relationship issues, school stress, anxiety, maybe a fight with their parents.”
“For a lot of teens, I know that they had a hard time during the pandemic, which is also what drew me to Teen Line,” she added. “So I thought that, if there’s some way that I could help teens not feel that way, then I want to do it.”
Before they can answer a call or reply to a text, each volunteer completes 65 hours of training with a professional counselor, who walks them through the core tenets of crisis management and active listening.
Image via Teenline
“We don’t really solve that person’s problems,” 15-year-old volunteer Max said in an interview with NPR. “But, what we can do is listen to them, validate them, make them feel really heard, like, in a moment that they might really need it.”
In 2024, Teen Line helped nearly 9,000 people, with some calls coming as far away as Japan and Tanzania. Cheryl Eskin, Teen Line’s senior director, estimates that they brought in more than 10,000 calls in 2025. As the calls gradually increase, Eskin said she’s seen an uptick in teens worried about AI encroaching on the helpline.
“Almost every night, we probably get asked, ‘Are you AI? Are you a bot?’ And they don’t want it to be,” Eskin said.
It’s that human element that keeps volunteers like Brooke and Max coming back, despite busy school schedules and social lives of their own.
“You come out on the other side of that call, and that person’s still with you, realized there was something worth living for and something that they cared enough to stick around to see happen,” Max said. “And I think that resiliency of humans is what I like to try to take away, instead of just the fact that we struggle. It’s the fact that we persevere through it.”
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A version of this article originally appeared in the 2026 Mental Health Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image via Teenline
