13 Apr 2023
St Albans-based mental health charity Youth Talk is appealing for the community to help raise £20K to enable them to furnish their new premises.
The organisation, which provides confidential and free counselling to young people in the St Albans area, wants to double its service provision and reach 20 per cent more youngsters each year.
The first goal to achieving their ambitions is Youth Talk’s new home at 64 London Road, – which will see an increase from four to eight therapy rooms – but they desperately need to raise the final funds to make the building a welcoming, safe space during a real time of need.
The appeal page for donations is www.justgiving.com/campaign/newhome
Here are some stories from young people who have benefited from Youth Talk’s services (all names changed).
Geraldine, 16, described herself as “generally struggling”. As she grew up she began to detest her body shape and was pining for a wafer-thin body. She felt her friends let her down badly and she rejected those she felt rejected by. Geraldine felt she had not “got over” the death of a beloved grandparent as had been “promised” by her mum.
In the counselling relationship Geraldine was able to think about the meaning of her distressed relationship with her changing body. She has taken up running again – this time with her dad – and this has helped her feel better about her body. She began to test out new relationships, gaining confidence that disagreements do not have to have catastrophic outcomes.
When she was 15, Sally found herself in a vulnerable position with a boy she had met online and had resumed self-harming. She reported suicidal thoughts. She did not want to go to school and relationships with her mum and friends were breaking down. When her parents split up she said she had felt “frozen”.
With her counsellor Sally started to make links between her parents’ divorce and friends coming and going. She negotiated with her parents to be able to stay permanently with her dad, and was able to recognise that some of her overwhelming feelings of loss were related to the loss of her family unit and was able to use the counselling space to grieve for and acknowledge these losses.
Abi, 15, has been living with anorexia since the age of 12. Her dad, now deceased, had been a heavy drinker and Abi remembers him being physically and verbally aggressive. Abi would hide in cupboards to escape the noise and fighting. Abi’s brother stepped into her dad’s shoes and became the aggressive, intimidating man in the house. Abi retreated into her own frightening world of anorexia and became her own savage bully.
Whilst the anorexic thoughts come and go in intensity, Abi confirms that she wants to live and wants to be healthy.
School is important to her and she continues to achieve well. She reports a closer, more mutually supportive relationship with her brother. At Youth Talk she has a safe space and place to have help attending to the complexities of her mind.
Eighteen-year-old Martha was in the final year of school when she became very unwell and developed a plan to kill herself. She was showing symptoms of psychosis and feared she had inherited mental illness genes. Throughout her life Martha experienced many separations from people she had become attached to. She had no way of understanding the attendant pain. Her defence was to be wary of further closeness. A turning point in her younger life had been her mother’s marriage to a man she now calls ‘Dad’. When this marriage ended it compounded other unresolved losses with a huge impact on her mental health. She has been able to work through old ways of coping and the fears and anxieties about her make-up. She has worked for a year and is ready to pick up her academic career at university.
Arif, now 17, broke down in his final year of school after struggling with academic expectations that were inappropriate for him.
He suffered agonies of identity around his sexual orientation. His sense of security collapsed when his parents divorced – he felt angry and deserving of more care from both of them. He expressed rage at his misfortune and others found it hard to help him. Arif put himself at risk sexually, he drove recklessly and when he tried to live independently – it was with disastrous effect. He brought these feelings into the counselling process. He faced the reality of his true skills and aptitudes. He was able to get an assessment of his learning needs as well as learning support for a new course of study. He began to see how he might make things happen to improve his experience of the world.
