More than 2000 text messages have been sent by young Otago people to the mental health website, the Lowdown, in its 10 months of operation.
The Auckland-based website, targeting the issue of depression among New Zealand youth, was launched last year and organisers had no idea how popular it would become.
It features celebrities and musicians, including Scribe, P-Money and Brooke Fraser, talking about their experiences with depression and allowed young people to text or email a team of counsellors for help.
From December 2007 to September 2008, 96,000 people had visited the website.
In that same time, 33,000 text messages and 2500 emails and been received, manager Dylan Norton said.
The busiest month was September when 5000 text messages came to the counsellors.
This team had helped prevent more than 20 suicides through intervention methods with high-risk youth.
Otago youth sent 6.25% (2063) of the text messages and 8.75% (219) of the emails received by the website.
In the month of September, about 16 young Otago people were being supported via text message by counsellors at Lowdown.
Kahu Youth Worker in Wanaka, Tarn Felton felt more than 2000 Otago young people accessing the site was a large figure.
She believed the issues facing youth in the region were the same as anywhere in the country.
However she felt working parents leaving their children alone more often was a cause of many youth issues.
While the older age bracket responded well to John Kirwan bringing the issue of depression into the open, young people did not, Mr Norton said.
The website was specifically targeted at youth as they "are in a different head space" than adults and tended to make decisions based on emotion rather than logic, he said.
Young people often turned to the Internet for information about mental health which meant a website based around text and email facilities suited the target market, he said.
"It's really working," he said.
He described the site as a place where young people who were experiencing mental health issues could go to get information and share experiences to help them through their problems.
"It's a really empowering tool which can normalise some of their experiences."
Self-help strategies could be formed on a case-by-case basis and further local support could be organised if required.
"We see ourselves as a step on the pathway to get to a better place."
The most common issue raised by youth using the website was relationships, but counsellors were initially surprised at the amount of youth who were self-harming, Mr Norton said.
He believed it was important to get youth talking about these issues and taking action because depression was highly linked with suicide, which was the second-highest cause of death for young people living in New Zealand.
Internationally, according to the Ministry of Social Development, in 2005 New Zealand had the fourth highest male suicide rate and the fifth highest female suicide rate in the world.
Lowdown counsellors are available between noon and midnight daily. - Ellie Constantine
