When our service is Live, you will see a chat bubble in the bottom right corner of our website. Just click on the chat bubble and type a message. You will then be asked to provide a nickname, age and the town you live in. Once this has been sent, a practitioner will join the chat as soon as possible.

Yes, you can!

You will need to close your chat and leave the site by closing the tab or window.

Finally, you will need to delete your browser history and cookies (one of our practitioners can help you with this if you are unsure how to do it).

An easy option may be to access the service through a private (or incognito) window, in which case no chat history will be saved on your device at all.

You will be chatting to one of our fully trained Talk to SAL practitioners. We all complete the same training so we all work in a very similar way. We listen to you to understand what is happening in your life and to help you find the best way to move forwards that feels right for you.

Talk to SAL was set up to help people with issues they may have in their personal relationships. These include relationships with family, friends, school and boyfriends/ girlfriends/ partners.

However, you can talk about anything that is important to you including: learning about healthy relationships and boundaries, gender and sexuality, peer pressure, social media, bullying.

Our service is also here to help support you if you are feeling harassed or if you are in danger (this may be online or offline). We may need to break confidentiality in some of these situations but we will always be honest with you.

We ARE NOT a crisis support service and if you feel that your life or somebody else’s life is in immediate danger we recommend that you dial 999 and speak to the emergency services OR you can call the Samaritans on 116 123 OR Papyrus Hopeline UK on 0800 068 4141 (9am-10pm weekdays & 2pm-10pm weekends & Bank Holidays).

There is no right or wrong amount of time for a chat to last. An average chat lasts around 45 minutes. Some chats only last a few minutes but others can last longer. The most important thing is that we have enough time to support you in the way that feels right for you.

Yes. Sometimes even our team spell things wrong. If we don’t understand something that you have typed, or we are unsure, we will ask and between us we will get there. In the same way, you can always ask if you don’t understand what we have typed

You may access the service as many times as you need to.

This isn’t possible as our practitioners work at different times. However, all our practitioners work in the same way so whoever you talk to you will always receive the same type of support.

Yes, Talk to SAL is a confidential service.

The things you talk about will remain private unless we believe that your life or another person’s life is in immediate danger or is at risk of immediate harm. We will always be honest with you and we will try and work with you to find the best way to keep you safe.

Talk to SAL will only break confidentiality if we believe that your life or another young person’s life is in immediate danger or is at risk of immediate harm. We will always be honest with you and we will try and work with you to find the best way to keep you and other young people safe. We will never hide what we are doing from you.

If you are not at risk of harm but would like us to tell someone you trust something, we can explore this with you too.

We would also break confidentiality if we receive inappropriate images or videos and we would need to report this to the police.

At Talk to SAL we very rarely break confidentiality.