"You're Helping Me Just By Listening"
Every young adult deserves mental health support that is personalised, easily accessible and free from stigma. Unfortunately, for many young adults, this isn’t the case. What we have learnt from young adults in Greater Manchester is that services aren’t currently meeting the needs of those who require support. On the whole, young adults don’t feel acknowledged and understood by mental health services. They struggle to navigate the complex landscape of mental health support on their own. When they do get support, they often wait without contact for long periods.
We have spoken to over 150 young adults across Greater Manchester (GM) to find out what their experiences have been like throughout all stages of trying to access help. The report has been structured as a young adult’s journey through the services, exploring the barriers that make asking for help difficult, showing people’s experience whilst they are with a service, as well as exploring what it is like to leave and transition out of a mental health service.
We split the data into three sections. Asking for help is hard: where young adults expressed their experiences in terms of negative early experiences, navigating the system, waiting times and not being ‘ill’ enough for support. Young Adults’ experiences in Mental Health services: including themes of, communication, feeling invalidated, lack of choice, representation and key issues young adults are facing at the moment, and finally Supporting young adults after a service: including, re-accessing support, the additional cliff edge at 25 and supporting young adult’s mental health outside the therapeutic environment.
The young adults involved in the project have also provided us with ideas on how services can be improved, explored in our recommendations throughout the report.
Young adults deserve personalised, accessible and stigma-free mental health support so on this basis, in conjunction with all the experiences and ideas shared by young adults, we have created 5 key recommendations aiming to overcome the extensive barriers young adults face, ensuring they feel acknowledged and understood within services that fall within: waiting times, increased levels of support for young adults to navigate mental health services, greater understanding of the key issues that young adults are facing, development of structures to support and involvement of young adult lived experience practitioners and the ‘little’ things that are part of a much bigger picture.
This research project was funded by the Greater Manchester Integrated Care Partnership as part of the Living Well development across Greater Manchester, to better understand young adults’ experiences in mental health services, gain insight on things that have not worked and find ways to change how services interact with young adults to make their experiences better in the future.
Are you a professional working in mental health across GM? Are you part of a team that wants to hear more and attend one of our workshops being put on across August 2024? – help us outline to commissioners how we can start to make the recommendations of this report a reality to ensure all young adults’ within GM receive person-centred, accessible, stigma-free mental health support. If so email kenzye.roberts@42ndstreet.org.uk sofija.zindule@42nd.onmicrosoft.com and amy.binder@42ndstreet.org.uk to arrange.
