No Health without Mental Health-Support YoungMinds

A big thank you to those who supported YoungMinds in 2015! You have made a massive difference to our charity this year. Your generosity has contributed greatly to our work improving the emotional wellbeing and mental health of children and young people. The year may be over but your support is still needed. Here's what we have achieved in 2015:

Parents

Despite answering more calls than ever before, demand for the Parents Helpline has increased dramatically to the point at which we have struggled to keep up this year. In the second half of 2015 our helpline answered close to 6500 calls and e-mails from worried adults. Nearly 600 of the calls were about depression, 500 about self-harm and 300 about suicide. Without contributions to our Save the Parent’s Helpline campaign, running throughout this year, we would have been forced to close this vital service. A massive thank you to those who have contributed, but donations are still needed to keep the Helpline up and running so we can help even more adults in need of support.

Young People

Our research in this past year has revealed that 75% of Mental Health Trusts have cut their or frozen their spending on Children and Young People’s Mental Health. Our charity campaigns tirelessly to get more funding for these services.  We involve young people in every stage of our campaigning work. It is they who have used and will use these services, so it is vital their voices are heard. This year we’ve tried to involve even more young people in our campaigning and this would not be possible without the contributions of our supporters. A definite highlight of our year has been one of our young activists delivering a petition to 10 Downing Street calling on the Prime Minister to increase spending on young people’s mental health services. Mental Health has certainly been on the political agenda and your continued support will help us to further allow young people the chance to affect real change.

Once again, a big thank you to all our supporters, we hope we can count on your generosity in 2016!

With the end of the year drawing ever closer. YoungMinds would just like to say a massive thanks you to everyone who has contributed to us through GlobalGiving so far. As a small charity, any donation really does make a big difference, so thank you.

We’d also like to keep you informed of what our charity has been up to in recent months…

Young people are the core of everything we do as an organization. As a campaigning charity we are heavily involved in lobbying the government for more resources for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.  Recent research undertaken by our charity into the responses of 165 Clinical Commissioning Groups, 97 local authorities and 37 Mental Health Trusts from Freedom of Information requests has revealed that the majority of all services have either frozen or cut their budgets for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.

As part of our campaigning around this, we seek to involve young people who have had experiences with mental health problems and have used such services as a result.

‘In the future I would like to see a service that doesn’t fail anyone, no matter their age, diagnosis, race, background or social status. My own experiences of mental health and also my situation with mental health services made me passionate to try and bring about a change. It is so important that people step up and shout about what needs to change, otherwise things will never get any different. My main ambition is to be part of bringing about that change.’

Annie, YoungMinds Activist

In September, two of our young activists delivered a petition to No. 10 campaigning for better access to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services and a reduction to the funding cuts affecting such services. They collected 71,000 signatures between them, and received the support of MPs Luciana Berger, Helen Hayes and Flick Drummond.

A donation to YoungMinds will continue to help us campaign and put young people at the forefront of issues that affect them!