Help Mental health crisis
We need your help!
Please fill in and share the survey about mental health crisis services for young people in Leeds.
I’m Natasha, I’m 20 and I am a volunteer at Healthwatch Leeds.
At Healthwatch Leeds we are passionate about improving the experiences people in Leeds have when using Health and Social Care services. We’re also really keen on making sure children and young people have an influence over services that they use. In fact, we have a group of young volunteers, YouthWatch, who do just this, and I feel honoured to be a part of this group myself.
There’s been a lot in the news recently about mental health. We have also recently had the UK Youth Parliament ballot, Make Your Mark, in which young people ourselves have said that mental health services need to be improved. As a young person who has had my own experiences with mental health, and an aspiring mental health nurse, I find these articles quite worrying.
Here at Healthwatch Leeds, this has been heard, and as part of our work this year we will be focusing on mental health. We wanted to start by looking at the experiences people are having during periods of crisis, with an additional focus being on the experiences of children and young people.
Just for clarity, by mental health crisis we mean when someone no longer feels able to cope or in control of their situation.
So, what are we doing?
The main part of the project is a short survey, which we are asking people living in Leeds to fill in. There’s a number of ways you can access the survey, but the easiest way is online.
There are other ways to access the survey – see below
As well as the survey, we will also be visiting youth groups to get further feedback from young people. After we have put all the feedback together we will be producing a report and a set of recommendations that we will share publicly and with people who make decisions about mental health services in Leeds. I’m personally looking forward to feeding back our findings to young people, one of the ways we will be doing this is via the MindMate blog!
What to do now:
Thank you for taking the time to read this blog, we would really appreciate your help in making sure as many people in Leeds have their say. You can help us by:
- Filling in the survey if you or someone that you know have had a mental health crisis in the last 12 months.
- Sharing the survey with people you know.
- Letting us know of any groups we could visit to speak to young people. You can do this by leaving a comment on this blog or emailing me at volunteer@healthwatchleeds.co.uk.
PS Another volunteer, Shanjida has written for the MindMate blog before about what we do and our work on the MindMate Champions Programme.
