Upon the decision to close for face-to-face counselling on Wednesday 18 March, No5 Young People quickly set up a telephone support line for the young people we were supporting prior to lockdown. This telephone line was open Monday-Friday 5-8pm and was supported by our counsellors on a voluntary basis.
This helped give us the necessary ‘breathing room’ to establish a video counselling offer, whilst we knew that young people could reach out for help via the telephone line if they were struggling.
During this time, we were also in regular contact with the OneReading Community Hub and learnt of the need for support for young people struggling with anxiety and depression who we were not already in contact with. We then decided to extend our telephone support offer to our waiting list and to young people in the community. Young people access this service in the same way; sending us a text and receiving a call back from a counsellor, and this support remains open for young people in the community.
We know that young people struggle to talk on the phone and so we are now exploring the cost implications and necessary training to set up a webchat-based service to work alongside our telephone support line and Zoom counselling service.
“We now have a fully functioning Zoom and telephone counselling offer, which is running at full capacity, and delivering 185 sessions a week to local young people.”
We now have a fully functioning Zoom and telephone counselling offer, which is running at full capacity, and delivering 185 sessions a week to local young people. These additional, remote services are here to stay and they will mean we have an increased capacity to see even more young people each week into the future, with counsellors working online and from our premises.
In the process of moving our services online, we found that some young people were telling us that they wanted to wait for face-to-face counselling to resume and not see their counsellor online, and so we started the process of asking them why that was. We learnt from them that they either did not have the technology to access remote services, or they did not have a safe, confidential space at home within which they could talk to a counsellor. Rather than leaving this young people to wait until we could resume face-to-face work, we applied for funding to purchase air purifiers and tablets for our counselling rooms so that we could re-establish our face-to-face offer and also offer young people to come to our premises and use a tablet for a remote counselling session. We started offering face-to-face sessions in September and are looking forward to re-opening again in the coming weeks.
The other area of our work that has really expanded during the pandemic is our outreach and preventative work. Our team of Young Ambassadors have been instrumental and led the charge on creating a huge amount of online content to share their experience and advice in order to help young people feel less alone, and understand that how they are feeling is normal given the circumstances we have all found ourselves in. This content has supported young people to take practical steps to take charge of, and look after, their own mental health whilst also being better equipped to support each other.
Our hope is that with the expansion of our service over these various mediums, we will be better able to provide true early intervention to young people in our community, reduce our waiting list and continue to provide essential support for young people as we face a huge surge in demand.
In the 6 months between August 2020 and January 2021, we have had 451 young people and their families asking us for help, that represents a 123% increase on the same period in the year before. This demand shows no sign of slowing down, with a further increase expected over the coming weeks as young people return to school and the impact of the last year is fully realised.
