Hopebound

Hopebound offers accessible mental health support to students

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Hopebound’s Christina Guilbeau, left, and Cayla Winn. (Photo by Brian Cornelius II) Graphic credit: Tara Aguirre/Cache Interactive

By Clare S. Richie

It’s not easy being a middle or high school student today with 24/7 social pressures and the uncertainty of a persistent pandemic. And adolescents who have marginalized identities such as being lowincome, youth of color, and/or LGBTQ+ youth are more likely to experience mental health stressors and less likely to access help, especially in Georgia, which ranks last in the nation for access to mental health care.

Hopebound seeks to bridge that gap by providing weekly one-on-one teletherapy to underresourced adolescents, ages 10-17 in Atlanta (and Newark), during the school year.

“Hopebound isn’t too good to be true,” said founder Christina Guilbeau. “We provide our services at no or very low cost because our supervised clinicians are pursuing licensure. Our mission is to make mental health support more accessible to adolescents in need.”

The nonprofit works with schools, afterschool programs and families for referrals. Hopebound staff meet with each caregiver and youth client to explain their services, complete the intake process and provide devices/hotspots, if needed. The adolescent is then matched with a supervised pre-licensed clinician.

“We also have monthly caregiver sessions,” said Cayla Winn, Hopebound Programs and Operations Manager. “We want parents to be as involved as possible – not breaching any confidentiality – but to check in on how their child is progressing.”

While teaching middle school in Baton Rouge, Guilbeau became aware of the lack of mental health support for adolescents.

“I saw how it made my students unable to show up in the way they really wanted to because of everything they were dealing with outside of the classroom,” Guilbeau said. She also experienced burnout trying to plan individual lessons for “100 students on almost 100 different proficiency levels,” so she sought mental health support for herself. “I had been dealing with what is called ‘high functioning anxiety and depression’ since I was 14.” Guilbeau said. That’s the age at which 50 percent of lifetime cases of mental illness begin.

Her “aha” moment came later while pursuing her MBA in nonprofit management at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

“During that time, one of my former students with whom I’m very close almost took her own life,” Guilbeau said. “I was the only adult who knew what was going on. I needed to do something.”

Meanwhile, Guilbeau’s friends and family members who were pursuing