Over the past two months, the IPčko civic association has seen a 150-percent increase in contacts from people in need of immediate psychological help and support on its helplines. Among them are a rising number of health professionals who are finding it increasingly difficult to cope with the current situation. Due to capacity and funding, IPčko is only able to take one call out of every six callers.
"We are very sorry that we are not able to help everyone who wants to get in touch with our experts at the very moment when they need us. We are working to be more accessible to people and to cover the specific psychological needs of people in crisis," said the director of IPčko Marek Madro. Since the start of the pandemic, IPčko's psychological counselling centres have recorded 110,000 contacts, six times more than in the period before it. Up to 74 per cent of all communications were with young people under 30.
The most frequent contacts to the IPC were people who felt lonely or had thoughts of ending their life. More than a tenth of the conversations (12 per cent) were about the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on people's lives. Help was sought by repatriated Slovaks, people who have lost a family member, health workers, the infected, people in financial crisis, those with insecurity and fear, as well as teachers and students.
The demand on the helplines is so great that the IPčko is having continuously to train and add more professionals. "In these days we will add 18 more professionals from the ranks of psychology, but we already know that this will not be enough. We are especially trying to focus all our remaining capacities these days on helping health workers. We have already conducted more than 4,000 help and crisis communications with frontline health workers. However, we find ourselves in a situation where we ourselves need a lot of help as well," said Dominika Rajzner, Programme Director of IPčko. Since 2012, IPčko has been helping mainly young people in crisis life situations.
