Mental Health & Wellbeing

Enabling young Londoners to lead happy, healthy lives by supporting their mental health & wellbeing

Young people’s mental well-being is now a national crisis. Even before the advent of Covid-19, there was a gulf between the availability of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and the number of young people needing their support.

This issue has been exacerbated by the pandemic – significantly increasing the volume of young people needing help with mental health issues, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Young people have experienced abuse, bereavement, anxiety about catching the virus or friends and family catching it, isolation and loneliness, worry about falling behind with their education or missing crucial exams, worry about returning to school and other aspects of normal life, and narrowing social networks.

We believe the relationships young people have with their youth workers and the safe spaces offered by youth organisations should be a crucial part of the solution to this issue.

Provision we have put in place:

London Youth has put in place a range of provision to assist our members across the capital to support young Londoners mental health and wellbeing.

Our flagship Mental Health & Wellbeing programme, Good for Girls, supports young women to access relevant, holistic early intervention mental health support, creating mental health hubs in trusted community spaces.

We offer our members free training workshops, collaborating with Mental Health First Aid England, Young Minds and our corporate partner CVC. Our Wellbeing and Mental Health Network convenes youth professionals to better support the wellbeing and mental health needs of the young people they work with and share best practice. We have partnered with organisations such as Power the Fight to continue to develop our delivery and provision. You can find quick links and external resources here.

The Mental Health & Wellbeing Network

The Mental Health & Wellbeing Network convenes quarterly. This network was set up to help youth professionals better support the mental health and wellbeing needs of the young people they work with.

The network allows our members to come together to address some of the challenges they face in this area, gain greater insight into wellbeing techniques and better connect with mental health services and other London Youth members. We’re always eager to hear from those interested in speaking at the event and/or co-producing a network, get in touch here.

Keep an eye on our upcoming events here where you will be able to register to join.

To find out more about our work on mental health and wellbeing, please contact mentalhealth@londonyouth.org

If you are a young person looking for mental health support, please visit the Young Minds website. Youth Workers can check on the following page for Mental Health & Wellbeing resources here.