Teens talk 2016: A Kids Help Phone report on the well-being of teens in Canada.

Each week Kids Help Phone connects with thousands of young people, helping to reduce their distress, and building their self-confidence and emotional strengths as they navigate through their most challenging moments of need. But we know there are so many more who need help and aren’t reaching out. That’s why we created Teens Talk. Using data from our annual National Teen Survey, we’ve compiled this report for two reasons: 1) To better understand the challenges teens are facing and 2) To engage Canadians in an important dialogue about how we can make our country safer, healthier and friendlier to young people. We learned a lot from our 2015 survey, but it also raised a lot of questions. How are the issues experienced by teens inter-connected? What factors influence the likelihood that a teen will experience a problem? What prevents teens from reaching out? As we explored the results of our 2016 survey, we found some very concerning connections. We learned that teens who experience issues with their body or self-image, or violence at school or home, are at least twice as likely to seriously consider suicide compared to the
general teen population. We also learned that the online search habits of teens reveals a lot about their well-being. In fact, it’s a primary indicator of the likelihood that they are experiencing a problem of some kind. So while they may not speak to anyone, their fingers are doing a lot of talking. The question is, are we listening? Understanding how youth connect to each other and to their support networks, as well as the barriers they face to seeking help, will be absolutely crucial to how we, as a country, can create solutions to the biggest challenges that our teens face today.