Suicide rates among young people continue to rise. For this reason, a Polish man created, with the help of his prayer group, “pray4teens”, a website that allows you to adopt a young person suffering from depression spiritually and may have thought about ending their life.

Krzysztof Gawrysiak, a technology entrepreneur, and the Polish prayer group “Palnik” members assure that they are not the founders of this project, but God, “who put this idea in our hearts” to pray for all those teenagers who are plunged into darkness.

During their visit to Rome on May 4, a few hours before being received by Pope Francis at the Vatican, they spoke with ACI Prensa about this project, which makes concrete the phrase of St. John Paul II: “Those who do not pray for lack of time, what they lack is not time, but love.”

The Beginnings

The idea of creating the website came after a retreat organized by his prayer group in Poland. The last Mass, celebrated by 600 priests, was attended by about 40,000 young people, with an average age of 17.

At the end of the ceremony, Krzysztof Gawrysiak told ACI Prensa that two teenagers approached them and shared “their testimony, which was heartbreaking.”

“Crying, they thanked us for organizing it and said it had changed their lives. Those teenagers had been invited to the prayer meeting by accident, as they had planned to end their lives that very day,” he recalled.

It was the first time the prayer group members knew this reality: “that young people really can end their own lives.”

Also, in December 2022, “a close friend of ours lost his 16-year-old son. He was with depression, and he was struggling with a situation at school…unfortunately, he hung himself and committed suicide.”

It was this tragedy, coupled with the troubling statistics of suicide among young people, that led them to create pray4teens at the end of January 2023.

“That’s why we decided to do a social campaign, asking ourselves what we could do as Christians, as people who follow Jesus. We know the power of prayer, the easiest and most powerful way to deal with this situation.”

“We asked God and prayed that he would show us how to do it. It was God who encouraged us to do this simple but powerful project, and he put the idea of individual prayer in our hearts, and we felt the need to promote a spiritual adoption.”

How does “pray4teens” work?

For the creators of this prayer initiative, which they are already working on translating into Spanish, the project’s beauty lies “in its simplicity.”

There are two options. On the one hand, it allows you to spiritually “adopt” a young person who has asked for help. “In your conscience, you choose the type of prayer, the duration, and since we don’t publish the names of the young people for privacy, we also encourage you to choose a name at random,” Gawrysiak explains.

The other option is to ask to pray for someone going through depression, or you can also ask for help from the young person. “We are getting so many messages daily; it breaks your heart.”

“Most of them are messages like ‘I’m cutting my wrists, please pray for me.’ There are many messages like that,” the Polish businessman laments.

In addition, he says that, for the elaboration of the page, they consulted with psychologists and judges on how to approach it and in what way it should be explained on the website. “It is a susceptible issue, and we have to understand what message we want to give to those struggling young people.”

“There are hundreds of young people asking us for help and, as a next step, we would like to offer psychological and psychiatric support. We have a phone number where they can call and ask for prayer, and we would also like to offer psychiatric help in some form in the future,” says Gawrysiak.

As it is a global initiative that aims to cover all the countries that suffer from this reality, “we have to work with psychologists in each nation. That is why it is a very complex project, and to achieve it, we are listening to the Holy Spirit.

The power of prayer

According to Krzysztof Gawrysiak, “Prayer is the most beautiful way of conversing with God, and He answers, and we have the evidence; we have numerous examples and testimonies of the power of prayer and how this project has already helped many young people.”

“We pray for their healing and encourage them to see a doctor. If the young person experiences such darkness, we pray for that to end and also to get to the root of the problem. We are waiting to solve it. It takes reflection, understanding the problem, and seeing how to make sure it doesn’t happen again or how I can help another youth.”

“Youth are responsible for creating change, and they can pray for each other. It’s not a global change; it’s a change that a young person can make in their group of friends, in their families,” he says.

Meeting with Pope Francis

During the audience at the Vatican, which took place on the afternoon of Thursday, May 4, they were able to explain the details of the project to Pope Francis.

In addition, they told him of their desire to promote it at World Youth Day 2023 and, as Gawrysiak told ACI Prensa, the Holy Father “was very interested and said he would talk about it in Lisbon.”

Alarming statistics

As the technology entrepreneur points out, 1 in 5 young people suffer from depression “for reasons such as the consequences of Covid, divorce or family problems.

“In Poland, last year, where 37 million people live, there were 20,000 unregistered suicide attempts, according to various statistics, by young people under 18,” he points out.

These cases are not registered because the police did not show up, and an ambulance was not called. Therefore, experts warn that “for every recorded suicide attempt, up to 10 can be counted.”

“And in every nation, it is more or less the same situation. In Italy, where the population is double, we can talk about 40 to 45 thousand suicide attempts in 2022.”

According to a report released last October by the United Health Foundation, suicides among U.S. teens aged 15 to 19 jumped 29% in the previous decade, while the rate among those aged 10 to 24 rose nearly 60% between 2007 and 2018, according to a recent report released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.