Life Left To Go

If you’ve read my earlier post Staring at The Sun, you’ll know that I’m passionate about issues surrounding mental health.  One of my main concerns is lack of awareness of mental health issues and the treatment available amongst young people, and one of the bodies that I think can be most helpful in tackling this is schooling.  Today, one of my colleagues showed me a report on mental health services provision in schools, which was put together by the St Albans Youth Council (SAYC).  The report is based on research into the awareness of and need for counselling services in schools, and makes some amazingly pertinent and important observations and recommendations, most of which I whole-heartedly agree with.  I’d like to summarise some of them here in the hope that others will share my enthusiasm, spread the word and where possible take steps to act on them. 

The SAYC contextualise their report by noting that their concern for mental health was brought on by what they saw as an alarmingly high number of incidences of suicide among young people in their region.  Touchingly, they dedicate the report to those young people who felt that this was the only option available to them.  What better reason could we want to work towards improved mental health, to ensure young people get the support they need during difficult times?  I share a vision with SAYC that by providing appropriate levels of support and signposting, we can make all those who are suffering realise that there are other solutions to their problems.  I find that songs can express my own thoughts and feelings better than I can half the time, and a simple but effective lyric that springs to mind is “There’s more life left to go…”.

One of the main points I want to iterate is that there quite clearly is not enough mental health provision out there for young people.  In their report the SAYC note that a local charity that provides talking therapies for young people had recently had to close their waiting list, because the need for help was simply too great for the provision available.  Whether this is due to a lack of funding, lack of willingness by those in power, or something else, I don’t know.  What I do know is that, if we want to stop young people from reaching a critical stage in their mental illness, whatever the cost, the need for mental health services needs to be given a lot more attention in the coming years on both local and national levels. 

The SAYC collected data using questionnaires in 11 schools in their region. Whilst all but one of the schools provided a counselling service, an average of 65% of pupils were not aware of this provision; in some schools this figure was in excess of 80%.  Quite rightly, the authors therefore recommend that schools use better signposting to ensure that pupils know what help is available to them, both inside and outside of the school setting.  As we can see from my previous point, the need for services is far greater than the provision as it is.  But I ask this:  what is the point in providing a service for young people if they simply aren’t aware of it and therefore cannot make use of it?

Another part of this report I find particularly striking is to do with factors that deter pupils from seeking counselling.  Those rated highest were those regarding privacy, such as ‘fear of friends finding out’ and ‘school setting’.  In other words, young people do not want to seek help for mental health issues because of fear of people finding out.  At first glance, this might suggest that we need to provide better signposting to services outside of schools, to reduce the fear of friends finding out.  But the wider issue highlighted here is the stigma around seeking help for mental health problems.  If young people saw it as socially acceptable to do this, then surely friends finding out would not be a deterrent from seeking help? 

For me, this all goes back to the need to educate young people about mental health, bringing it to their awareness in the same way as physical health.  I’m pretty sure a young person wouldn’t think twice about seeking medical attention for, let’s say, a sprained ankle, so why on earth should they feel any differently about a mental health problem?  As Nick Clegg has recently noted, “mental health must have the same priority as physical health”.  I don’t often have a great deal of time for what our ‘top’ politicians say, but I couldn’t agree more with this!

There’s a lot more I could say, but I’ll leave it here to keep this a reasonable reading length!  I hope you will all agree that this is absolutely one of the most critically important issued faced by our society today.  If there is one small thing you can do to help the cause, such as sign the Time To Change pledge (link below), increase awareness by sharing this page with other people, or signposting a young person in need to a local mental health service yourself, that would be amazing.  If you’re someone who has the power to do something big like take steps towards increasing funding, or set up a new mental health service, even better!  As my song lyric from earlier goes, ‘there’s more life left to go’, and I really do believe that the quality of that life can be enhanced for a lot of people with the right services and strategies in place. 

Thanks for reading and comments welcome as always.

Links:

http://www.time-to-change.org.uk/pledgewall

That's Not Real To Me

The song this post’s title comes from is Real To Me by good old Brian McFadden!  I’ll be talking all about how so much of what we see in the media in today’s society isn’t real, and the difficulties that we face in distinguishing what is real and what isn’t.

What inspired me to write this post is something I saw on TV on Sunday.  I caught the second episode of Superstar, Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s latest reality talent show, in which he searches for a ‘Jesus’; someone to play the lead role in Jesus Christ Superstar.  To my surprise, Jonathan Ansell (or ‘the blond one out of G4’) appeared on the show.  He’d got through to the boot-camp-style training stage of the show but was sadly sent home at that point.  Anyway, there ended up being a bit of an uproar on Twitter where Jonathan received a lot of stick for being ‘arrogant’, as a result of him being edited to be portrayed in such a light on the show. 

 

Now, back in the day I was a MASSIVE G4 fan (and proud, might I add!) and have followed Jon’s solo career to certain extent since they disbanded.  As a result, I’ve met him quite a few times at gigs and happen to know that he is actually a really lovely guy and has a huge amount of time and respect for his fans.  But 10 minutes on TV showing viewers a couple of moments that don’t paint him in a good light and bang!  A great number of people is left with an inaccurate, negative, but probably lasting impression of his personality.

On a brighter note, Ben Elton has written some quite entertaining novels that illustrate this propensity of reality TV producers to edit people in whichever way they like to make a more entertaining show (namely, Dead Famous and Chart Throb.  Dead Famous in particular is a good read, in my opinion).  Chart Throb basically takes the mick out of singing competitions like The X Factor.  In this story, the Simon Cowell-like producer of the show uses the powers of television editing to make some perfectly reasonable people seem like complete idiots.  For example, a sound-bite of “I’m not claiming I’m the next Elvis” would later be cut down to “I’m the next Elvis”, to make a humble individual seem perfectly arrogant.  Although it’s obviously a fiction book, I wouldn’t mind betting this is a fairly accurate, if slightly exaggerated, representation of how things work on these show in real life! 

As well as being damaging to individuals’ reputations, the media’s portrayal of certain things can also be damaging on a much wider scale to it’s consumers.  I’m talking particularly about media influence on body image, ideal self and self-esteem.  As you may have picked up on in previous posts, body image is something I feel really strongly about and there is a lot of work to be done by various parties to diminish the deep-set problem of poor body-image and self-esteem in modern Western society.  The media has a key role to play in this issue, with the use of airbrushing to create unrealistic ideals in appearance that real people can never hope to achieve, and for that matter shouldn’t hope to achieve!

An example of the images used in Media Smart's educational package

Fortunately, awareness of this problem seems to be on the up, and the Government’s Body Confidence Team has recently worked in conjunction with Media Smart to create an educational package which is designed to teach 11 year-olds about airbrushing and how to distinguish between what is and isn’t real; what images they should and shouldn’t aspire to be like.  What’s really great about this package is that it uses images of really famous people, like Britney Spears and Keira Knightly, and shows children how these people look before and after airbrushing.  This should help to give people the tools, from a young age, to view media images critically and learn how to avoid striving for unrealistic ideals in their appearance.  There is a lot of work still to do, but I think this is a great start.

I could go on about body image all day, but for now I’ll finish there.  Please do leave comments if you have any views on this, and please do come back for more on my views on body image in later posts.  As always, thanks for reading!