Instructions Unclear: What a Crisis Hotline Taught Me About Helping People

A cracked phone screen? Replace it. A messy room? Organize it. A bad haircut? Pretend it never happened and wait three months for it to grow back. We live in an era where almost every inconvenience comes with a solution, a tutorial, or a 30-second TikTok explaining how to transform your life before breakfast.

Naturally, we have started treating emotions the same way.

When someone says they are stressed, we immediately reach for advice: “Make a schedule”. “Get more sleep”. “Did you try drinking more water?”

Our intentions are usually good. We want the people we care about to feel better, and when someone we love is hurting, sitting with their pain can feel almost impossible. I, too, used to think helping someone meant having the right answer. I imagined that the best way to support someone was to find the perfect words that would somehow make everything feel lighter. Maybe it was because we are taught to value solutions from a young age. In school, every question has an answer and you are rewarded for identifying the correct one.

The Problem With Having All the Answers

But this pattern rarely applies outside the walls of the classroom. I learned this lesson while volunteering for the California Youth Crisis Hotline, where I spent my shifts speaking with teenagers who reached out for support. I entered the experience believing that helping someone meant finding the right words or the perfect sentence that could pull someone out of their darkest moment.

One evening, I answered a call from a student who was struggling with depression and self-harm. She told me she felt completely isolated, with no trusted adult or friend she could turn to, so the crisis line had become her last option. As she spoke, I realized there was no part of my training that could hand me the perfect sentence to make everything okay. There was no script for grief, loneliness, or hopelessness.

Listening to her, I recognized a feeling I knew well—but not for the reasons I expected. I have always been an indecisive person, the type to spend fifteen minutes comparing options on a menu because I’m afraid of choosing the wrong one. Because for years, I saw decisions as the search for the perfect answer. 

However, listening to her made me realize that real life rarely works that way. The most difficult moments rarely come with a clear solution, and mental health certainly doesn’t. There wasn’t one sentence that could erase her pain or one piece of advice that would suddenly make everything okay. Most choices are not between a right or a wrong one and. So, instead of searching for the right answer, I focused on asking the right questions. As our conversation continued, we slowly unpacked the fears and uncertainty that had led her to call. Rather than rushing toward a solution, we talked through what she was feeling, explored the resources available to her, and discussed what taking the next small step might look like. By the end of the conversation, her circumstances hadn’t magically changed. But, she no longer felt like she had to face them completely on her own.

Why We Rush to Rescue

With each call, I transformed my understanding of what it means to support someone. I stopped measuring a conversation by whether I had “fixed” someone’s problem and started measuring it by whether they felt heard. Every caller’s story was different, and there was never a formula that guaranteed the “right” outcome. Instead of trying to control the conversation, I learned to meet people where they were.

Ironically, that’s something many of us struggle to do outside of crisis work too. When a friend tells us they’re overwhelmed, we instinctively start brainstorming solutions. When someone says they’re anxious, we send productivity hacks or remind them to “look on the bright side.” These responses usually come from a place of care, but psychologists have found that people often overestimate how helpful advice will be while underestimating how valuable simply feeling understood can be. 

As Harvard Health psychologist Dr. Rebecca Jordan-Arthur notes, rushing into fixes can completely derail our good intentions: “They jump into problem-solving, saying something validating, but then immediately tell the person what they should do next. They don’t let that validation sink in. It’s like putting on anti-itch cream and then immediately washing it off.” 

On the other hand, research on social support consistently shows that perceived emotional support—the feeling that someone genuinely listens without judgment—is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress. Perhaps that’s because advice is about the future, while listening acknowledges the present.

Maybe the Answer Is Not an Answer

That realization feels especially important today. According to the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, nearly 40% of U.S. high school students reported experiencing persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness, and about one in five seriously considered attempting suicide. Those numbers are staggering, but what struck me as most surprising was the number of people who thought they had nowhere to go. According to registry data tracking active nonprofit and community services, there are 33,893 mental health organizations in the United States alone. And yet, youth hesitate to reach out. This is because we celebrate independence from a young age. We praise students for solving problems without assistance and admire people who appear effortlessly put together. Asking for help can start to feel like admitting defeat instead of acknowledging that you’re human.

So, in a culture that celebrates quick fixes and perfect solutions, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is stop treating every difficult emotion like a problem to solve. Some moments simply require another person willing to sit beside us, even when neither of us knows exactly what comes next.

About the Author

Batul Raja is a high school student in the Bay Area that is passionate about psychology and pursuing a career in mental health.