After expanding its services in recent years to address the growing distress of youth in Quebec, Tel-jeunes said funding issues are forcing it to cut some of its programs, including in-school workshops and a chat service for teens, by teens.
The organization, which provides listening and psychosocial intervention services for youth, said it received emergency funding from the Education Ministry to the tune of $8 million over four years for special projects during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The peer-to-peer chat service was one of the services Tel-jeunes put in place to help teens cope during the health crisis.
“We had teens, aged 17 to 19, that worked with us at Tel-jeunes, who would respond to teens who contacted us with their concerns,” said executive director Annie Papageorgiou.
When the pandemic ended, however, so too did the additional funding.
Tel-jeunes said it applied for a grant for the 2024-25 school year, but learned from the Education Ministry in December that it hadn’t been selected.
That was around the same time the organization was sounding the alarm over rising mental health calls to its kids’ helpline, which runs seven days a week.
The phone service helped 30,000 young people in 2024, with Papageorgiou telling CBC in an interview at the time that 15 per cent of them had suicidal thoughts — twice as many as in 2019, before the pandemic.
Without additional resources, Papageorgiou said the organization had to focus on maintaining its essential or front-line services.
The decision to end certain programs was “difficult” and “heartbreaking,” Papageorgiou said, because in addition to layoffs, it also means reduced support for young people in need.
Teachers aren’t mental health specialists
That is also a concern for school administrators, who are calling on the government to reverse course.
“Students have had a tough time coming back to school after the pandemic and they still have impacts of that and it shows,” said André Bernier, president of the Association québécoise du personnel de direction d’école — an association representing more than 800 school administrators in the province.
Bernier said Tel-jeunes’s workshops in schools, which reached 15,000 students last year, touched on mental health and other topics and while teachers know about the issues, they aren’t specialists in those fields.
“They don’t know enough to go as far as Tel-jeunes could go when they were coming to schools,” he said. “And that’s a big impact.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Education Ministry says it didn’t terminate any funding agreements, but prioritized organizations in more precarious financial positions than Tel-jeunes.
The ministry said its decision doesn’t reflect on the important services Tel-jeunes offers.
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