MK Mayor and MK Council Cabinet Member highlight need for mental health support for young people at YiS Youth Counselling Service AGM 2019.
YiS Youth Counselling Service - the only free generic counselling service that supports children and young people from childhood and adolescence to adulthood throughout MK - welcomed the Mayor of Milton Keynes Sam Crooks and Councillor Zoe Nolan, the Cabinet Member for Children and Families at Milton Keynes Council, at their ‘Anxiety: Practical Tips and Tools for Working with Young People & our AGM 2019’ event last Friday.
This comes at a critical time for YiS when the charity has had to turn away 160 young people who have requested counselling in the past year due to unprecedented high demand for their services. Whilst the charity offered 23% more sessions last year and saw 10% more clients than the previous year, YiS Youth Counselling Service was still unable to keep up with the unprecedented high demand for mental health services for children and young people in Milton Keynes.
Comments from the Mayor Sam Crooks and Cabinet Member Zoe Nolan come at a time when the services provided by YiS to young people aged 11-21 in MK have never been more needed. Demand has continued to increase considerably which has put added pressure on dwindling resources. It’s recognised that early intervention is vital in preventing low to moderate mental health issues escalating into more serious, and costly, conditions. Also, YiS is the only local counselling service that supports young people from childhood to adolescence to adulthood which prevents young people feeling ‘abandoned at 18’ by mental health services as recently featured in The Guardian.
Gareth Eglinton-Pacitti, CEO at YIS, commented: "We have recently been faced with the hard decision of having to close our waiting list to new referrals, but any and all publicity we receive thanks to Mayor Sam Crooks and Councillor Zoe Nolan helps us to generate funding that will enable us to recruit more fantastic volunteer counsellors and to therefore see more young people around MK. We know from the feedback we get from people we’ve seen that our service makes a real difference to the lives of local young people.”.
Mayor Sam Crooks stated in his speech that “1 in 10 of children & young people between 5 and 16 suffer from a diagnosable mental health disorder, 50% of adult mental health issues were established before the age of 14 and there’s been a 68% rise in the number of young people being admitted to hospital in the last 10 years because of self-harm”. He also added that, “80,000 young people suffer for diagnosed depression, brought on by factors such as academic pressure, social media, bullying, difficult relations with their parents or the death of a parent and it horrifies me as a magistrate that over 90% of young people in prison have a diagnosed mental health disorder.”
