Kids Help Phone is Canada’s only 24/7 e-mental health service offering free, confidential support to young people in English and French. As the country’s virtual care expert, we give millions of kids, teens and young adults a space to get support.

Insights is our platform to share non-identifiable (meaning no personal / identifying details), aggregate (meaning not individual) and scrubbed (meaning no identifying information) data from the stories, conversations and support we provide to young people across Canada every day.

For youth, we want to share a reminder that they’re never alone. No issue is too big or too small, and in fact, hundreds of other young people may share some of the same thoughts and feelings.

For anyone else, we want to share learnings from our data. We hope to help guide services, programs, policies and systems with the information we have and help ensure strong, responsive and evidence-based support for people in Canada.

Each and every day, we hear from hundreds of people in Canada in their moments of need. Through phone calls, texts, online forums and instant messages, we continuously learn what young people are struggling with, the fears they have, the pain they’re experiencing and, most importantly, what brings them hope. We’re the largest frontline serving young people across Canada, and all of the non-identifiable and scrubbed data presented on this platform comes directly from our services.

Data presented on Insights comes from our operational and monitoring data (e.g. service volumes, etc.); professional counsellor and trained, volunteer crisis responder logs of the issues discussed in conversations; and opt-in surveys that are scrubbed of any identifying information. This data is only used for service improvements and to provide insights into the needs of young people to inform existing and potentially new Kids Help Phone programs. All data is stored in Canada and never given to any external organization. For more information on our data collection and analysis, please feel free to contact us.

All quotes / stories appearing on Insights are from the open-ended questions we ask on our post-conversation surveys. Any quotes / stories presented here are shared only after receiving explicit permission.

Respecting young people’s privacy is important to us. We want to reassure them that their conversation with us is confidential. This means that our counsellors and crisis responders will not share their information with anyone outside of Kids Help Phone, unless they’re worried about their safety.

We never share data or information from individual conversations. Any data shared publicly (e.g. on this platform or in external reports, etc.) is always aggregated and anonymous. This means it’s an overview of all of our conversations and services and doesn’t describe any individuals or offer any identifying information. To learn more, you can check out our Privacy policy.

Insights has been reviewed by a third-party Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA). To discuss this assessment, please contact us.

We welcome data collaborations, but our Terms of Use is that any public use (e.g. in media or public reporting, etc.) of the data we own on this platform requires written permission from Kids Help Phone. If you’re looking to present any of our data publicly, please contact us to request permission.

The data presented on Insights is only a snapshot of the full datasets we have at Kids Help Phone. If you’re interested in working with us to pull more learnings, insights and guidance from our service data, we’d love to hear from you! You can contact us to discuss opportunities for collaboration.

We’re at the forefront of leveraging data and artificial intelligence (AI) to shape the future of mental health in Canada, but we need partners to help us bring our impact to scale for young people from coast to coast to coast. By supporting our innovation and data work, you can help to inform proactive programming and public policy, transform how we use and share data and drive new digital technologies that meet folks where they’re at. Whether you’re an organization or an individual, there are many ways for you to get involved.

You can contact us to learn more and discuss ways to engage in this transformational work!

We’d be thrilled to work with you to share stories from our data in the media while maintaining our values, data integrity and respect for privacy. Please note that our Terms of Use is that any public use of our data requires written permission from Kids Help Phone. For more information, to request permission or to book an interview with us, please contact us.

Insights is a newer initiative at Kids Help Phone, and we’re eager to find out what you think!

If you have feedback for us, or ideas for our data work, you can fill out this short survey. All survey responses are anonymous. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!