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When Jamieson Brill answers a crisis call from a Spanish speaker on the recently launched national 988 mental health helpline, he rarely mentions the word suicide, or “suicido.”

Brill’s family is from Puerto Rico. He knows that just discussing the term in some Spanish-speaking cultures is so frowned upon that many callers are reluctant to even admit they’re calling for themselves.

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Young people deserve the opportunity to be heard and express their feelings in a safe space. But for newcomers to Canada, unique challenges like language barriers can make it difficult to access mental health support.

As approximately half of the newcomers fleeing from conflicts in Afghanistan and Ukraine are young people, Kids Help Phone identified an urgent need to provide a safe space to speak about their experiences. The Canadian youth mental health charity scaled to provide professional phone counseling service, via a LanguageLine interpreter, in Dari, Pashto, Russian, and Ukrainian. They are the first mental health organization to do so in Canada.

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