We’ve heard about a mental health crisis in young people. And in 2025, Arkansas received unfortunate confirmation. But the Arkansas Crisis Center is planning to launch a new program in 2026 to stop some crises before they develop.
The Arkansas Crisis Center is one of three primary call centers in the state responding to 988 calls. Joshua Gonzalez, the board chair of the Arkansas Crisis Center, says that’s a line anybody can call.
“Anyone listening is in crisis. And when I say crisis, that is self-defined to you. It is not what somebody else thinks is a crisis. It is what you think is a crisis.”
A person can call 988 or text HELP to 988 on a phone.
“And you’re going to get a very compassionate, trained mental health counselor who can help you navigate through whatever you’re going through.”
In 2025, about 20,000 Arkansans used 988. Gonzalez says in February last year, the Arkansas Crisis Center began accepting text and chat messages for the service. And last year, about 10,000 people seeking the service arrived via those new availabilities.
“Which was very shocking to us. There was so much demand. And the second part of that was also just quite shocking was about 70% of the people that reached out to us on text were children under the age of 18.”
Quite a change since, Gonzalez says, before chat and text became available at 988, fewer than 5 percent of the people calling were 18 and under.
“And then we open up a new modality of communication, which is text, and suddenly we’re seeing, I mean, the same thing in the news headlines that everyone sees, that there’s a youth mental health crisis. And we’re on the front lines of that, getting those youth help. Some of the calls, the texts are very serious. And we have to have emergency intervention to save their lives.”
And this is where a new program, AR Teen Connect, comes into play. Joshua Gonzalez says the idea is to train other young people to listen and help their peers in distress, and not just when a situation is reaching a crisis point, but before.
“Because when you have 700, 800 youth texting you a month in crisis, that’s just not something you could ignore because our youth are going to become our future leaders. So I started talking to them. My staff started talking to them. We had groups. We connected with other organizations and figured out that sometimes for youth these days, they do not feel as understood by adults in certain situations because school is so different than what it used to be.
“It is a different world. There’s really not a lot of similarities to how somebody who’s maybe 40, especially with social media, the speed of information. There’s so many different buckets that youth can fit into now, so many different groups that didn’t exist beforehand.”
The new program is funded for two years by a grant from the Blue and You Foundation through Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield, with a plan to have community partners become involved to make long-term operations sustainable.
Gonzalez says the training, with safety and security as priorities, will allow young people to talk with other young people who are struggling. He says the idea is to hear from teens and younger children where they’re in an initial nobody-is-listening-to-me phase.
“It’s like a fractal. The whole downstream thing doesn’t happen in that negative way if we can intervene positively. And we can get another teen who’s like, man, like I get it. Yeah, they’re being passive aggressive. These emojis are doing this. I get why you feel like you’re not fitting in. Have you tried this? Have you tried talking to some other people? What about these other groups?
“And just being there to hear someone, it makes a huge impact. And if you can get that early on and maybe it’s serious, they can be like, hey, well, maybe you should go talk to your parents. Like, I really think you should. Because sometimes teens bottle things in. If we can provide that service, our hope is none of these downstream consequences will happen where we’re at 100 percent capacity on a suicide and crisis lifeline with teenagers calling into us.”
AR Teen Connect is new for the state, and Gonzalez says it’s pretty new for any state.
“LA has one. I believe there’s only one or two others in the entire country that have done this. And we’re in contact with them, and they’re just seeing incredible results. So bringing Blue Cross and Blue Shield through the Blue Foundation, bringing this program to Arkansas is really innovative, and we’re extremely grateful that they saw the value in this program as well.”
Joshua Gonzalez says the objective is to have AR Teen Connect fully staffed and fully operational by April of this year. More information about it, Arkansas Crisis Center and the 988 service can be found at https://www.arcrisis.org/.
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