Reach Out Australia

Thank you for providing an awesome service to both teenagers, young adults, and their parents / guardians. Great job.

This site can be useful if you're looking for coping strategies for stressful times during your teen years, often the advice given on the site lacks the nuance or the awareness that sometimes there are no positive solutions to your situation. It's a good thing that the site knows that it's not a replacement for actual therapy, as people on there will often tell you to seek psychological help if you're concerned about your well-being or showing signs that you should be. During the couple of years that I frequented the site, the biggest drawback was that the forums would be redesigned every couple of years. Often they'd be hosted by a different site, so often you would have to sign up for a new forum account every two or three years once this happened. The last time I checked, they'd seemed to have seen the error of this practice though and have had the same set of forums since 2012. Because this site is mostly aimed at people in their teens and their very early twenties, you'll often find that the people on there cycle out of the forums every couple of years. So while a large part of the forums hinges on the idea of there being this tight-knit online community, it often lacks a strong enough old guard for anyone to really believe this is the case. Generally though, if you're in the site's target audience, this isn't going to be too much of a problem for you. But the people who run the site did find a way to skirt around the issue of there being no real old guard on the site: often the moderators and administrators are active in the community, acting as a guiding force for some of the more serious discussions on there. Some of the mods and admins seem to be from the same group of mods and admins that were around when I signed up for the site in late 2009 or early 2010. Unfortunately, there's rarely enough nuance to the conversations for it to be worth using if you're hoping for any kind of in-depth understanding of the issues being discussed, or even for a perspective more nuanced than the high level of optimism that pervades the site.