Katherine Hay is the president and CEO of Kids Help Phone, which provides mental health support to youth across Canada. During the pandemic, her organization has seen a huge spike in calls, texts and online messages. Hay spoke to Toronto Life about what?s causing the surge and how Kids Help Phone mobilized to meet the increased need for support.
How has the pandemic affected what you do at Kids Help Phone"

During the first two or three months after Covid hit, we saw a 350 per cent increase in calls. We didn?t go dark for even one minute. When the pandemic hit, we didn?t say, ?Well, we better start innovating.? We were built for something like Covid. We offer several different services: our phone line; our text line, Good2Talk; and a crisis service. Though it?s still human-to-human communication, our crisis text line uses machine learning to triage based on a texter?s severity of need. It looks for particular words that are more likely to indicate that a texter is in need of an active rescue. Has the demand continued throughout the pandemic"

Yes. Even putting aside Covid, it hasn?t been a happy, sunshiny year. We saw a spike across all our platforms when the Australian bushfires started at the beginning of 2020. We saw another spike with the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash. Again after the Nova Scotia shootings, when grief went through the roof. The number of kids reaching out to us about racism and discrimination doubled in the wake of George Floyd?s murder. This w...