Being a “young person” and also being a “young person who runs workshops for other young people to get feedback for what young people need in mental health institutions” is sometimes confusing. And empowering.
Having been in and out of mental health support from: a) the NHS b) my university and c) Private counselling centres I’ve certainly had my fair share as a “young person in the system”. At the same time I have also been working for mental health organisations; I was selected as an artist-in-residence for arts and mental health charity 42nd street (who also happen to be Youth Access members!). I was given some money (!), advice sessions, free space and an opportunity to put on a new performance piece around the theme of mental health. I’ve taken part in lots of youth advisory consultation sessions with various mental health charities where I get paid to air my grievances, have free snacks and a taxi home. The Dream Job really.
However, when I started working for Youth Access I got to peek behind the curtain and see the other side of running these workshops. My role was to work with two other young people and our clinical lead Dr Isabel Hanson to create a series of workshops to gain feedback from other young people on how mental health services could improve their support. Then we would take this feedback and put it into a quality framework.
A “quality framework”? I hear you say. What is this nonsensical jargon?
It’s basically a set of key ideas, values and principles that organisations can use as a guideline for their services. It does sound on the face of it quite boring and theoretical. However, after speaking face to face with young people and hearing the difficulties they have come up against it’s more important, now more than ever, that the guidelines for young mental health institutions come from the young people they are meant to serve. Maybe the reason “principles” and “quality frameworks” in the past have been so heavy or difficult to understand or implement is because they aren’t created by the young people they are meant to be for.
We want to build ours from creatively engaging the young people who need mental health support. For example, in our workshop we asked young people to “draw the weather in your head” as a warm up exercise. One young person went beyond the call of duty and drew themselves falling from a cloudy sky held by a parachute. When we got talking to this young person it was really interesting to hear about how different scaffoldings of support (family, friends, hobbies, their mental health hubs, their nail tec even!) were their metaphorical parachute during turbulent times.
We also asked the young people to draw themselves in the centre of their piece of paper and then draw five circles. In each circle they would write the different people, places, activities that supported their mental health starting in the closest proximity circle and moving further out to the margins of the page.
This was incredibly helpful in finding patterns of where young people get support from, what qualities all things possessed and which systems of support felt more distant to young people (largely “the doctors”, “NHS”, “School” tended to be the main contenders).
Having such rich visual, written and verbal data has really helped us to build a quality framework that more accurately reflects the needs of young people. Not only finding some more key words that might have been missed before (cough cough “parachute”) but also recognising the role of proximity to communities and mental health hubs that offer personalised and judgement free support.
I am really excited to run the next few workshops online and across the country. It has been so insightful to gain feedback from young people in creative and new ways; hopefully, it’ll make for a new quality framework that reflects them.
