Youth-Life-Line

Youth-Life-Line is an online counseling, specially designed for young people and adolescents until the age of 21 who are currently facing a crisis and who are suicidal. The counseling exclusively takes place via mail and is based on peer concept: all counselors are adolescents and therewith in the same age. The peer-counselors are voluntary pupils and students between 15 and 25 who were prepared for their engagement in a 70h course. Furthermore there are pedagogic-therapeutic professionals which train and supervise the peer-counselors as well as organize and develop the concept of Youth-Life-Line. From the beginning the project has been accompanied scientifically by the University Tübingen and the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the University Hospital. It was shown that the project not only fulfills the function of counseling suicidal youths but also contributes to the personality development and competence gain of peer-counselors. An important component is prevention work which is also based on peer-concept and which can decrease the threshold of using help in crisis and therewith reduce the number of suicide attempts and suicides of youths. Hence the project provides lectures and trainings for multipliers (e.g. teachers, social workers and parents), workshops for pupils as well as the presentation of the counseling offer and voluntary commitment in schools (in the Reutlingen/Tübingen area). Despite of that the project offers information on its website about the term suicide, suicidal thoughts, warning signs, numbers and facts about suicide, false assumptions about suicide and indications on handling suicidal persons. Furthermore there is a blog providing news about the project.

German

Germany

Link: http://www.youth-life-line.de/

(access date: 06/27/2017)