SEATTLE — Through a new partnership between the city and Talkspace, an online behavioral healthcare company, teenagers and young adults in Seattle can receive free therapy over text and free sessions.
"I feel like mental health is healthcare, and healthcare should be as accessible as possible to everybody," said Olivia Roberts, a sophomore at Roosevelt High School.
Roberts said this type of support is welcomed.
"Mental health affects like, especially when you're a teenager attending high school, it affects almost every single thing you do in your daily life, like talking with teachers or hanging out with friends, or like, how much drive you have to do something, or how much fun you're going to allow yourself to have while doing certain activities. And I feel like having an accessible resource to help people with that is just a really great opportunity for everybody," Roberts said.
This week, the City of Seattle announced its partnership with Talkspace to expand virtual therapy and mental health services for teens and young adults.
"The goal is to reach 55,000 students. So, you know, we're optimistically hopeful that we'll be able to do that," said Chris Alejano, the K-12 post Secondary Division director at the Department of Education and Early Learning at the City of Seattle.
Talkspace will meet teens and young adults where they are, on their phones.
Anyone from the age of 13 to 24 can sign up for the free service. People can register to start receiving therapy right now.
They'll be matched with a provider and can receive unlimited messaging therapy and one live video session per month.
"Youth in our country today are experiencing a mental health crisis, right? When 40% of high school students report feeling so sad or hopeless that they're considering suicide, we're seeing rising rates of suicidal thoughts amongst this population," said Nikole Benders-Hadi, the chief medical officer for Talkspace.
Officials say the need is great to help those who are struggling and to prevent teens from falling into bad habits such as violence.
"High school is just crazy, and even probably after high school is just crazy and just having, like a trusted outlet that you can just express what's going on is going to be really beneficial to everybody," Roberts said.
Many teens and young adults find the cost of mental health support to be a barrier. Talkspace hopes its new partnership will help break down that barrier.
"We continue to see multiple barriers to accessing mental health care, really, nationwide, but the cost of services is one of the major ones. So best of all, the best part of this partnership is that Seattle has made this service free to interested young people," Benders-Hadi said.
The funding for the partnership is coming from the $14.55 million joint investment from Seattle Public Schools (SPS) and the City of Seattle to expand mental health support services.
The City of Seattle is excited to see how many people register for this new tool. They are hoping more youth and young adults will learn about the free service.
"It is totally new, which is great because, again, like the energy behind the opportunity and the service and the interest is there, so it's just a matter now of maybe getting sort of what's been the first week's worth of registrations and checking that out, working with talk space to find that data, or gather that data and see where we might be more strategic and launch additional sort of efforts to get the word out," Alejano said.
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