Someone to Talk To
September 28, 2026
The first funeral Chad Varah ever led was for a fourteen-year-old girl. It was 1935, and Varah was a newly ordained clergyman in England. The girl had died by suicide after mistaking the start of her period for a shameful disease. No one had told her what her body was doing, and she had no one to ask.
Varah later said the girl had changed the course of his life. He began giving frank talks at youth clubs, telling young people what adults were too embarrassed to say. And in 1953, as rector of a London church, he set up a telephone line for anyone in despair. That single line grew into the organization Samaritans, which answered more than 134 million calls in its first 70 years.
Crisis lines spread across the United States in the decades that followed. Idaho’s own hotline began taking calls in 2012. Within a decade, more than 95,000 calls, texts, and chats came in from every Idaho county. Since 2022, dialing 988 has connected Idahoans to that line.
A crisis line meets someone in their hardest moments. Varah’s talks in those youth clubs reached for something earlier: the months and years before the phone rings. Public health workers call this upstream prevention, which means changing the conditions young people live in before a crisis arrives. The CDC lists social isolation, bullying, and discrimination among the factors that increase suicide risk. Among the factors that protect against it, the agency lists feeling connected to school and community.
A teenager can sit in a full cafeteria and feel invisible, especially if they suspect that who they really are wouldn’t be welcome. We want every young person to walk into a school, onto a sports team, or into a youth group as they are and be met with gladness.
That is the work of Communities for Youth, a Boise State University initiative now working in more than 30 Idaho communities. In the small town of Marsing, teens are invited to take a well-being survey, and each year the community gathers to review the results. Last fall, students ate pizza and watched a movie in the school cafeteria. Down the hall, their parents, caregivers, and neighbors walked among posters showing what those teens had reported about loneliness, stress, and whether they had an adult they trusted enough to talk to. The adults discussed the data and voted on what to work on as a community.
The early results give reason for hope. In recent years, the numbers on those hallway posters have moved in the right direction: youth depression in Marsing has fallen. The town has taken that as a reason to keep going. This year, its local coalition wants every student to sit down one-on-one with a school counselor at least once. It is also asking students which clubs they want and planning events like bingo nights. Each of these efforts tells a young person that someone knows them and wants them around.
The girl Varah buried was born free and equal in dignity and rights. Nothing that happened to her changed that. Part of what failed her was a silence no one around her thought to break.
At the Wassmuth Center, we teach people of all ages to recognize, interrupt, and prevent injustice. The last of those is often the quietest. It looks like neighbors gathered on an autumn evening in a small Idaho town, reading what their young people have told them and deciding, together, how to help each one feel known.
If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988, or chat at 988lifeline.org. Help is free and available 24 hours a day.