Emotional health and wellbeing: Useful information

Hi, my name is Chris, I’m a youth worker for Salford Youth Service and I lead on the LGBT work for the service.

At the moment we have 2 LGBT groups in Salford, the first is on a Monday night at Bridgewater Youth Centre 5.30 to 8pm and anyone is welcome to attend and the second group is at the Beacon Centre on a Thursday, same time 5.30pm to 8pm.

The LGBT youth groups first and foremost it’s a social group, we want young people to come and meet young people who have similar interests, similar things going on in terms of sexuality, gender dysphoria, make friends so you can share those experiences and support each other. Then we do topical stuff as well, we get involved in LGBT History month, International Day of Homophobia and Transphobia and Manchester Pride. We also going on residentials this year, do fun things like bowling and it’s a really nice place to come and meet young people similar to you, make friends and get involved in lots of projects and activities throughout the year.

I am happy to come and work with young people in school, one to one and do things around sexuality and gender and we can do work around supporting the family, parents, grandparents who maybe it’s a little bit new for them, so we’ve done work around that before. Bullying in school, if you are feeling low/down all those sorts of things the group can offer support, we can offer support.

We also have 7 volunteers, one of whom is an expert on transgender issues and can give lots of advice and guidance in terms of referrals to gender identity clinic and to other support groups that are out there. You can just turn up if you are confident enough or you can contact me at LGBT@salford.gov.uk

Hi, I’m Maria Slater, I’m one of the managers from CAMHS and I support the team that works from Salford and I’m Jane Davis and I’m a nurse with Salford CAMHS and I have a special role at the moment that’s working with children that are in schools and teachers and with CAMHS as well, so trying to link up CAMHS and schools together to make sure that we support children, young people families and teachers when children need to get support from CAMHS.

A lot of people sometimes will say to us they have been referred to CAMHS and they actually don’t know what CAMHS stands for, so CAMHS stands for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. So we work with people who are up to the age of 18 and we try and support them throughout the journey of any difficulties that they may be having.

Lots of time it’s the difficulties, it’s when it’s impacting on your day to day life and you are having major challenges keeping up with normal routine stuff so we will support you when you experience distress like that.

What we know is that children will have difficulties its part of everyday life to have good days and bad days, so when people are having more bad days that good and those bad days have been happening for many weeks and months and other things that they have tried like support from school or counselors at school or maybe specialist workers that are there like learning mentors hasn’t helped or maybe things are just getting more complex or more serious that’s when CAMHS could get involved to support the young person and family to think about what changes could be made, what extra specialist support could be given and how we can help people get back to that day to day routine where the good days start to become more frequent and the quality of their life improves.

I’m Dr Tom Tasker and I’m a GP at St Andrews Medical Centre in Eccles, so a GP is also known as a family doctor.

So we can help by being the first port of call, so for many young people they will come to see the GP initially, we will listen to their story, try to understand the issues that they are faced with and then together with the young person work out a plan and a way forwards, so that might be to come back and see the GP again for a further discussion and for the GP to the continue to provide support, it may be to signpost to other organisations such as voluntary sector, so 42nd Street is one such organisation across Salford and into Manchester that is really helpful to young people with anxiety and depression type problems, or we may make a formal referral on, so we may refer on to CAMHS, Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service if that is necessary.

So how to make an appointment with the GP, so I’m aware that for some young people this might be the first time you have tried to do that, so obviously you will need to be registered with a GP, most people will be, your parents will have done it for you when you were younger, if you are not registered with a GP, then if you look online there is advice in terms of how to find a local GP surgery for you to register at.

With regards to making the appointment, if you are under 16 then usually we would expect and adult to accompany you the appointment, if you are 16 or older then you are free to come to the appointment by yourself.

In terms of the practicality of making an appointment you can do this by calling into the surgery or by telephoning or practices are now offering online access, so if you are signed up to do that you can make a booking over the internet. When you come to make the booking you don’t need to give any details about why you want to be seen, appointments normally last about 10 minutes which although is a reasonable amount of time isn’t quite as much as we would like, so to help you in that 10 minutes appointment, you might find it helpful to write down some things that you want to cover during the consultation with the GP because this is your opportunity to tell them as much as you can about what you are worried about.

So we can support young people with all sorts of emotional and mental health issues so more commonly we would see people with low mood, perhaps feeling anxious, panicky, worried about things, not enjoying life as much as usual, feeling perhaps that life is not worth living. In addition to those types of symptoms we also see people with eating disorders, I would hope that you would find most GPs to be approachable so that during the consultation you feel at ease and able to talk about how you are feeling and that together you develop a plan of how you want to go forwards.

After the appointment it depends on what the plan is, if the plan was to come back to see your GP we would normally want to make a follow up appointment, which would be anything from 2 – 4 weeks afterwards, if you were being passed on to another service, it may be that you contact that service yourself, if it was 42nd Street, or if it was one of the more regular mental health services like CAMHS the GP would make the referral and you would hear directly from the service regarding an appointment.
So there is a whole range of things that we can do to help young people who come forwards.

Hi I’m Scott and I work at 42nd Street and I am a Mental Health Practitioner here.

At 42nd Street we support virtually any young people who are going though any kind of stress at the moment, so we work with anyone from 13 up to 25 and if you are going through anything, sort of around depression or anxiety, you are just feeling like things are getting a bit on top of you or if you have been through anything recently and you just want to chat to someone that’s the kind of stuff that we do around Salford and a few bits around Greater Manchester as well.

So in Salford we have a few workers that do one to one support and that can involved anything from an informal chat about stuff, if you are not really sure what’s going on and you just want to explore why you are not feeling yourself at the moment and we also offer counselling, which is when if you know full well something is going on or you are like this is something that I’m not quite happy about in my life and I’d like to explore it a little bit then we can offer that as well.

Then what happens is as soon as you get in touch we will arrange something called an initial meeting and we will have a chat and you will tell us how you would like to work with someone and we will find a worker that can work with you in whatever style that is and explore things in a way that you feel comfortable.

And the other thing that we do in Salford is group work and that is where I come in, so if you are part of a group or you go to school and you think that maybe something around dealing with difficult emotions would be useful we can pop in and we can do a session with the group around that as well.

So in Salford we don’t have one base we pretty much go wherever we can because we are aware that sometimes getting around Salford can be a pain, so we will get as close to you as we can then our main base is in Manchester, over in Ancoats so we can also meet you there as well if it’s easier to get to the city centre.

Some of the groups that we offer, we have a creative group and we do lots of projects in and around Salford and Manchester and we run something called the Creative Agents which is really informing what work we do as an organisation so we would love to hear from you if you are interested in that. We also have an LGBTQ project which is online at Q42.org.uk and what we want is to hear from everyone around Greater Manchester about your experiences, about what kind of stuff you think we should be doing, how we could be helping someone and that will all be based online.

So if you would like to get in touch with us head to our website which is 42ndstreet.org.uk and there is loads of information on there about the kind of services that we offer and the kind of groups that we are running and there is a form on there that you can download, fill that in yourself or get a parent to do it with you, or a carer or someone at school or another organisation, get that back to us and then we will get in touch and we will start setting up that initial point of contact with you.