Rachel Nelken - Reimagining Mental Health Care for Young People and Their Communities
In today's challenging and risk-averse funding climate, charities rarely get to experiment with new and untested ideas. At Raw Material, we are excited to be leading one of 24 newly funded consortiums in South London, exploring innovative new approaches to support young people's mental health. This funding has come through a bold new programme from the Maudsley Charity 'Building Brighter Futures'.
As a long-established funder in mental health, Maudsley Charity took a strategic approach to the now widely acknowledged youth mental health crisis. They led a careful process to unite health and social prescribing professionals and organisations from the NHS and voluntary sectors. They held facilitated meetings to discuss how best we could work together to reach and support young people most in need.
As a social prescribing organisation, we have worked in this field for years. This was the first time we had received an invitation to sit across a table from our healthcare colleagues. We hoped to learn more about how the NHS functions in youth mental health. From the meeting, we reached out to CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) and to theatre practitioner and cultural producer Tony Cealy. He is a long-time advocate for creative health. His work in legislative theatre and co-design with communities is highly respected.
We then formed a small consortium with two enterprising NHS teams: NHS EPEC (Empowering Parents, Empowering Communities) and NHS Discover. EPEC works directly with parents. They use an authentic, peer-led model, involving parenting groups led by parents with lived experience. They will use approaches from the 'Living With Teenagers' programme for this project. It aims to improve young people's development and difficulties, parenting, family resilience and coping. NHS Discover is a team of clinical psychologists. They deliver evidence-based therapies to young people in schools, open to all young people. We also have Kings College as a research partner. A trusted partner from previous work, London Arts and Health, will lead the strategic planning. Together we will explore what a combination of all our services could look like, and based on our discovery, develop a funding proposal to scale up the programme over 3 years.
Our new collaboration will combine our expertise in working with young people and their families. We will explore both 'traditional' and creative mental health support approaches. We aim to prevent and intervene early, aiming to improve outcomes for young people with developing mental health issues at a critical time in their lives. We will focus on young people and their families in South London. They come from diverse communities let down by traditional healthcare services in which systemic racism and inequality are baked in. We are committed to offering options which are inclusive, welcoming and engaging as an alternative.
We've named the project "Creative Communities, Creating Change." We are now in a 6-month phase to explore true collaboration across our ways of working. The aspiration is to embed a programme that we deliver together at Raw Material’s newly refurbished, purpose-built centre in Brixton, for the long term.
As a project team we are working towards a key moment in this development phase. In February, we will run four co-production sessions with young people and their parents, separately and together. These will be led by our consortium and creative practitioners. We hope to trial some of the approaches we might put in place longer term. We will look to our communities' expertise and lived experience. They can help us find new ways to combine our work as individual providers. This will unlock new support pathways for 'thinking and feeling.'
Some of the questions we will explore together and with our communities include:
What does a 'one-stop shop’ look like, joining all our provision together?
How can psychological/CBT approaches work outside a clinical setting? How can creative approaches complement them?
What are the creative approaches that involve parents and young people working together?
How can we give young people and their parents the best options to support their mental health?
At this stage, we have little idea what the answers will be. But we're committed to the process. We believe there is a better, more collaborative way to work than what exists now. For those young people and their families most in need, we want to offer the widest range of options we can. We know they haven't been well served by current institutions or services. We hope this will develop people's skills as 'creative architects' of their own lives. They will design their own recoveries, creating positive change for themselves and their communities.
Watch this space as we will update next year on our progress! And if this interests you and you want to get involved, feel free to get in touch at hello@rawmusicmedia.co.uk
