Time to talk

Sat in a café watching the hustle of the busy high street below, my son looked across at me and said “you know, I think anger is the best friend of sadness. Sometimes sadness needs the anger to cover for it”. Out of the mouths of babes and all that but let me tell you, it’s quite confronting to realise your 8 year old is already wiser than you. 

What followed was an education. My husband and I sat and listened as our children talked to us, to each other. They talked about themselves, their friends their teachers. They took their time, moving between their experiences of things and their opinions on what was behind those experiences. Some of it was funny and other bits quite hard to hear. Then we joined in. The four of us having a conversation as peers and equals about the things that were on our mind. None of us assuming a superior knowledge about the experiences of the other.

Our family set up means we get to spend time with each other every day - a privilege not to be taken for granted. And we’re a chatty bunch, we talk a lot. But if we’re really honest, it’s easy to forget to listen, and if we’re really really honest, it can be difficult to bear witness to other people’s sadness or mental distress. And so we pat it away, try to fix it, make it seem smaller and better than it really is. I feel confident that there won’t be a parent of a small child out there who at one point hasn’t felt the panic of an incoming meltdown and hurriedly declared that they’re “just hungry” or “over tired”. We teach our kids from a young age that we're not always able to listen to what's going on.

Today is Time To Talk Day, and this year’s theme is to encourage people to say what they really mean. Pushing past the “I’m fine” response to hear how they really are.

I love the concept of Time To Talk Day. Our social and familial connections are what can keep us safe during times of emotional hardship or mental ill health, and we keep those connections alive through conversation.

But there is no point in talking if there’s no one there to listen. On Friday I sat in a room with a bunch of genuinely brilliant adults, each of us with grand jobs and grander job titles, working through the very complex challenge of how we can develop new solutions to help to stop young people from reaching the point of mental health crisis. Also in the room were three (genuinely brilliant) young people who have lived through crises and now share their experiences to drive changes in care. One young woman, I’ll call her Sam, listened to our chatter about data and complex risk models, and told us that the thing that would have helped her the most when she was reaching a crisis point would have been to have her feelings validated. To not have been told that she was ok when she knew she wasn’t. To have had the space to talk and be heard. Her words held the room.

The work we’re doing in Newham as part of the Kailo project does exactly that. Our work is being led through a series of fortnightly conversations with groups of young people, to hear what causes them mental health harm and their ideas about how to change that. They’re real conversations where they work hard. They disagree with each other, debate, unpack and explore. With every session the relationships get stronger and the discussions richer. We then open those spaces up to continue the conversation with policy makers and system leaders.

The rise in mental health need amongst children and young people is causing alarm across the country. But this isn’t an intractable problem. Sure we need innovation and research to close the treatment gap. And yes, we need better ways of identifying need earlier on and targeting support appropriately. But mainly we need to talk more to our young people, and really hear what they’re telling us.

Rachel Surtees, Director of Implementation, working on our adolescent mental health programmes.