Reimagining mental health care for young people

How often do arts organisations get the chance to truly experiment? At Raw Material, we have been leading one of 24 new consortia in south London, exploring innovative new approaches to support young people’s mental health – funded through a bold programme from the south London-based Maudsley Charity: Building Brighter Futures.

As a long-established funder in mental health, the Maudsley Charity takes a strategic approach to the now widely acknowledged youth mental health crisis. Last year they led a careful process to unite health and social prescribing professionals and organisations from the NHS and voluntary sectors. They facilitated meetings to discuss how best to work together to reach and support people most in need.

Combining forces

As a social prescribing organisation, Raw Material has long worked in this field but this was our first invitation to sit at a table with healthcare colleagues. We hoped to learn more about how the NHS functions in youth mental health.

From that meeting, we reached out to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) professionals and to theatre practitioner and cultural producer Tony Cealy – a long-time advocate for creative health. whose work in legislative theatre and co-design with communities is highly respected.

Together we formed a small consortium with two enterprising NHS teams: NHS EPEC (Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities) and NHS Discover. EPEC works directly with parents, using an authentic, peer-led model, involving groups led by parents with lived experience. NHS Discover is made up of clinical psychologists, who deliver evidence-based therapies to young people in schools.

With King’s College London as research partner and London Arts and Health on board to support strategic planning and bid writing, we have collectively explored what a combination of our services could look like.

Alternative options

The collaboration combines our joint expertise in working with young people and their families to explore both ‘traditional’ and creative mental health support approaches, focused on south London. Most of the families are from diverse communities, who feel let down by healthcare services in which systemic racism and inequality are institutionally endemic.

We are committed to offering alternative options that are inclusive, welcoming and engaging and we named the programme to reflect our aspiration: Creative Communities, Creating Change. Using what we have learned over the first 6-month phase of focus groups and discussions, we are aiming to develop and embed a programme to be delivered jointly Raw Material’s newly refurbished, purpose-built centre in Brixton.

A key moment in this development phase of the programme was four co-production sessions involving young people aged 11-19 and their parents – together and separately. The sessions were led by us with creative practitioners Solomon Adams, Jess Mollie and James Yarde.

Over the course of the sessions, we worked with 50 people across the generations, using Mentimeter for focus group questions alongside taster experiences of possible future sessions – including theatre, music production, open musical improvisation and talking therapies/group discussion and sharing, led by NHS Discover and EPEC teams.

We interrogated a range of topics from deeper questions – such as Current Support Systems, Coping Strategies When Not Feeling Well, Access to Creative Groups, Mental Health Stressors, Creative Activities which Foster Connection – to more practical ones – such as how and when people might like to access the activities and who they’d like to see delivering them.

Continues…

Photo: Jezima Hirepec

What young people really want

What was noticeable (perhaps unsurprisingly) was how much more engaged and collaborative the groups were after participating in the creative aspect of the session. There was a palpably different feeling in the room with many more people actively participating in sharing their opinions and insights, demonstrating the power of creativity in action.

Overall findings, which we will factor into longer-term planning, revealed what young people and their families really want to see in mental health services – summarised here:

• Access to arts-based mental health support for both parents and young people.
• Structured programmes focusing on self-care, connection and behaviour management.
• Regular creative workshops in a variety of settings – community and health spaces, and online, with community/neutral spaces the most popular.
• Reduced barriers to mental health support by improving accessibility and reducing stigma.
• Incentives such as expenses/vouchers to encourage long-term engagement.
• Expanded creative mental health programmes, especially music and arts-based activities.
• Improved access to mental health services by addressing long waiting times.
• Implementation of youth-led facilitation to increase engagement (young people wanted to learn from and work with other young role models).
• Flexible, regular engagement opportunities.

Overall, the findings backed up our assumption that there is a better, more collaborative way to support young people’s mental health than what’s currently on offer.

For those young people and their families most in need, we want to offer the widest possible range of options. They haven’t been well served by current institutions or services to date, so we hope our longer-term programme will develop people’s skills as ‘creative architects’ of their own lives, able to design their own recoveries, and ultimately creating positive change for themselves and their communities.