For every phone call that gets answered, Yaseen Poonah can’t help but think about the thousands that don’t.
Poonah, founder and president of Naseeha, a GTA-based volunteer helpline for Muslim youth, started the service nearly a decade ago with the aim of giving teens across North America a free and confidential place to call for support.
Staffed with counsellors for only three hours on weekday evenings, the service has long struggled to meet the demand of teens calling from as far away as Hawaii, New Mexico and California to talk and seek spiritual guidance, on issues common to all teens.
But then came the U.S. election campaign.
Over the past year, Naseeha (which means advice in Arabic) saw its call volume increase by more than 300 per cent over 2015, according to Poonah.
“Now it’s a different ball game,” he said. In 2015, Naseeha received more than 4,000 calls. But between January and December of 2016, the service received more than 16,000 calls — many of which went unanswered simply because of a lack of staff, he said.
The concerns of Muslim youth are largely the same as those of all youth, Poonah added: “Depression, mental health, bullying, suicide, LGBT and questioning gender identity are the big ones.”
