Rewriting the narrative for young people’s mental health

Dougie Boyd is Brook’s Director of Education and Wellbeing. For this Mental Health Week, he explains why opening our first Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub in Cornwall is the natural next step in our proud history of meeting young people where they need us. 

Brook has never shied away from working in spaces that young people have needed us to, even if it goes against prevailing societal attitudes. It’s in our DNA. From Helen Brook setting up the first Advisory Centre in 1964 to provide sexual healthcare services to unmarried women, to our landmark assertion of young people’s ability to consent to their own healthcare as enshrined by law in the Gillick competencies and Fraser guidelines in the mid 80s. Our willingness to meet young people where they are, to provide services and education that is evidence-based, needs-led and rights-orientated mean that Brook has been trusted and prized by young people and adults for 60 years.  

There are a myriad of reasons for our success and longevity, but two key ones are a commitment to listen to what young people and service users tell us about what they need and how they want to access our services. Secondly, we prize education, agency, and prevention. In recent years, we innovated our Digital Front Door to make services more accessible and to free up clinical spaces for the most vulnerable. We have significantly expanded our education and health promotion work to make sure that young people have the right skills, knowledge and information to keep themselves safe, to self-treat at home if appropriate, and to have the confidence to accesses services as and when they need them. 

We have defied expectations, seeing an increase in schools’ work for RSHE in light of RSHE becoming a mandatory subject and we have seen massive growth in our health promotion work for adults, working with communities who traditionally find services difficult to access. 

But at the heart of our success has been doing what young people ask of us.

In our 21/22 national consultation, young people challenged us to redefine our mental health provision, to shout about it more and to grow it to address ever-increasing need. Brook has proudly delivered counselling and therapeutic interventions for 25 years in work that is mostly adjacent to our sexual health work, but sometimes as standalone wellbeing and therapeutic services. That young people were asking this of us was no surprise. For many years, Brook has been aware of the intersection between sexual health and mental health as evidenced by the ever-increasing number of referrals into our counselling services from our clinics, but also the very high numbers of mental health concerns as part of our safeguarding work.   

What young people told us in 2021 was that this intersection wasn’t just an academic interest piece but was part of their lived experience. Where we tended to separate sexual health and mental health, they challenged us to stop thinking in silo. They told us that the Brook brand, the way that we work with young people, the physical spaces we create for them and the safeguarding and confidentiality aspects of our provision matter to them and they want to see these fuel a growth and expansion of our mental health work.  In short, they challenged us to rethink services in the very same way the Helen Brook did back in the 1960s; to open up mental health care for young people, allowing them to advocate for themselves and to learn how to keep themselves safe and healthy. 

At Brook, we have learned that when young people speak, it’s in everyone’s interests to listen to them.

This spring, we will launch Brook’s first Mental Health and Wellbeing Hub in Truro, Cornwall. Sited adjacent to our current all-age sexual health service this brand new space has been renovated and custom-designed with support from Big Issue Invest and service delivery has been funded by the Department for Health and Social Care. 

In this new space, Brook will create an accessible physical space that is flexible for Brook to deliver a range of emotional, mental health and wellbeing interventions to children and young people between the ages of 11 and 25. We will work with young people in 1:1, small group, family and workforce development modalities. The bedrock of this service will be in- person but we are committed to providing each of these interventions digitally, ensuring that we improve access across a wider geographic and demographic area, something particularly pertinent for Cornwall. 

Young people will work with our trained staff to curate service plans that meet their needs, moving seamlessly between education, wellbeing, therapeutic and non-therapeutic offers as is required. Utilising the Rogerian person-centred bedrock, our therapeutic interventions will provide two additional specialities: cognitive behavioural therapy and trauma therapy. 

Young people will be encouraged to self-refer and for as long as we have the necessary skills and expertise to safely work with them, and the capacity, we will co-produce a care package with them. We will also provide more specialist services: 

• Working with young people who experience a label of neurodivergent 
• Working with LGBTQ+ young people 
• Working with young people on the mental health/sexual health intersection 
• Working with young people who experience suicidal ideation 
• Working with young people who have experienced trauma.  

We are thrilled to be launching our first hub in Cornwall, but our ambition doesn’t stop there.

We are actively seeking funding and partnership opportunities for other hubs across the country and are keen to provide more bespoke counselling services for young people who experience a label of neurodivergent. 

Brook believes that the crisis in young people’s mental health isn’t a narrative that is set in stone. Third sector organisations can disrupt the status quo and equip and upskill young people to take care of their mental health in the here and now, but also across their life course. Having normalised access to sexual health services for young people, Brook is excited to be rewriting the narrative for young people’s mental health.