5,600 young people can t be wrong. How will YOU help us? #FightThePressure. powered by

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1 5,600 young people can t be wrong. How will YOU help us? #FightThePressure

2 Foreword by Ben White, YoungMinds Vs Policy Ambassador Growing up in Britain today isn t easy. You have to find new friends at a new school, your body starts to change and you have to deal with these hormones that seem to be taking you over. But as if acne wasn t enough, it seems this new world you ve entered has a nasty side. People are attacking you or your friends verbally or physically on a daily basis. Lots of your peers have started watching porn, sending naked photos to each other or having sex far earlier than you expected, and you feel under pressure to do the same. The older you get the more pressure you find yourself under to meet the grade academically. Each time an exam comes up it seems like the most important thing in your life and you feel like you ll be a failure if you don t succeed. Even if you don t fall off the academic ladder after years of preparation, you expect to get a job but can t, making you feel worthless. With factors like this so rife among the youth of our society, it is no surprise that mental health issues like depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders and even suicide have become so common among young people. Yet it is incredibly difficult to access support services for these issues with many people having to wait months to get the help they need. What makes it worse is that very little is being done to tackle these issues. Somehow it seems society has come to see these things as normal and acceptable, yet the reality is far from it. It is so important that this changes. I am honoured to be part of the fantastic YoungMinds Vs campaign that is trying to make that change happen and make things better for all young people. Together with your help we WILL fight the pressure! Introduction from YoungMinds about YoungMinds Vs Young people are at the heart of everything we do at YoungMinds, and youth engagement is a central component of our work. Our young campaigners kept telling us how tough life is for them and how hard it is to get support when they need it. Countless research studies from universities, voluntary sector organisations and statutory bodies have backed this up. We decided to take action. In co-creation with young people, we developed a youth led campaign that would generate a groundswell of young people fighting for better mental health, for all young people. Comic Relief and the Big Lottery agreed with us and funded the project. With great pride, YoungMinds Vs was launched in January 2014 at a parliamentary event supported by MPs Paul Burstow, James Morris, Nick Hurd, Ed Miliband and Frankie Sandford from the Saturday s. Our team of young activists and supporting organisations are fighting the pressure by: Raising awareness of the campaign in their communities and online. Representing the campaign in the media - galvanising the voice of children and young people seeking change. Working with local and national decision-makers to influence services and support for young people. Partnering with a range of organisations who are committed to ensuring young people s mental health is central to their work. How we consulted with young people: YoungMinds Vs has consulted with a total of 5,600 young people through focus groups, online consultations and surveys. The first consultation took place from October to December young people were asked what were the big issues that affect them. They told us: bullying, stress at school, sexual pressures, no work and lack of access to help. These results formed the YoungMinds Vs campaign priorities: YoungMinds Vs Sexed Up Don t believe the hype (tackling sexual pressures) YoungMinds Vs Bullying Stop the rot (tackling bullying) YoungMinds Vs School Stress Rewrite the rules (tackling school stress) YoungMinds Vs No Help Make your feelings loud (tackling the lack of support and help) YoungMinds Vs No Work Fight for your future (tackling unemployment) The second and third consultations (January and May 2014) each asked 2000 young people how these issues affect them and what needs to be done. This report presents the results from these consultations in young people s own words. SEXED UP Don t believe the hype Jessica s story Society is sexed up. If we want to, in just a couple of clicks we can watch hardcore pornography and share explicit photos. For many of us this isn t how we want it to be. It is making us feel stressed out about when and what we should be doing sexually. We also worry that the images we share might come back on us in the future or be looked at by adults when we don t want them to do that. We worry that it s unclear that when a girl says no, she means no and that boys have to look and behave like men to survive. All this is piling on the sexual pressure, and making us really aware of the way we look and act which can lead to body confidence problems, stress and anxiety. Over half of year olds have viewed online pornography, with 4 out of 10 believing it has affected their relationships. 75% of young people want sex education that gives them the chance to talk about sex and relationships. Children and teenagers live in a world where sex is in our faces. When I was 13 many of my friends were getting half naked photos sent round of themselves, one of my good friends was raped and many people in my year were having sex. By that age I was being made to feel that by not watching porn or by not having sex that I was doing something wrong. My sex education in school consisted of watching an out of date film and no chance to discuss anything that mattered. My sister is 13 and it really concerns me that she could be made to feel the same as I did. I want her to be able to ask questions without feeling judged or embarrassed, to be given real information instead of school-girl rumours, and to feel comfortable with who she is, knowing that she doesn t have to feel pressurised into doing anything she doesn t want to do. We want every school to ensure we get sex education that helps us understand more about relationships, and how to say what we want and don t want. We want sex education that gives us the chance to talk about pornography and how it affects us. We want safe spaces where we can talk about sexual pressures online, in school and youth centres. We want more information about sexting so everyone understands the bad things that can happen if we do it. We want more help and advice for parents and carers so they understand how to talk to us about sex in sensitive ways.

3 BULLYING Stop the rot Bullying, both on and offline, is happening all over Britain. Most of us have witnessed bullying and many of us have been bullied ourselves. Bullying makes us frightened, it ruins our self-esteem, affects everything in our lives and can lead to years of suffering. Bullying can affect our relationships when we become adults, and can make it hard for us to find and keep jobs. SCHOOL STRESS Rewrite the rules Fitting in the A*- C box at school is everything, if we don t then we feel like failures. The exam factory environment is making us feel stressed out. For some of us, it is even harder at school because we are caring for family members at home, we aren t well ourselves, we are being bullied or we have learning problems. This means school stress combined with our own problems can lead to low self-esteem, anxiety, depression, eating disorders and self-harm. Half of the children and young people we consulted with have been bullied. 85% of young people affected by bullying want support for as long as they need it so the bullying stops affecting their lives. Over half of the children and young people we asked believe they will be a failure if they don t get good grades. 82% of young people said schools should prepare pupils for life, not just exams, by teaching them how to cope when life is tough. Jack s story I was nearly thirteen when I started to be bullied at school. The bullying became so bad that I was physically attacked many times I was terrified the bullies were going to kill me. But I was too scared to tell anyone because I was scared the bullies might find out and make it worse. As a result of the bullying I developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and I was never able to return to mainstream school again. Although this happened three years ago, the flashbacks and constant nightmares continue to make my depression worse; have made me self harm and I have tried to end my life. I am now sixteen and I am trying to move on with my life. I am campaigning to stop the rot that bullying creates for young people like me. Jasmine s story All through school, me and my friends were always being told that if we mess up in our exams, then we have messed up our futures. The pressure made me feel so stressed out all the time - I didn t eat or sleep properly for ages and I felt so unhappy and desperate. I didn t feel I could talk to anyone, and all my teachers seemed to care about was good grades. I had an idea stuck in my head that if I didn t get perfect A* grades in all my exams then I would be a failure, somebody who would never be good enough for university or my future career. I m campaigning to stop schools just being exam factories and for teachers to also help us to deal with all the pressures we face when we are growing up. Getting support after bullying first happens isn t enough. Often the effects don t show at first, they can start to show weeks or months after the bullying has happened. We want long-term support for everyone who is affected by bullying. We want schools to build young people s emotional strength so they can cope better with all the problems of growing up - of which bullying is a big one. Schools need to help young people understand more about mental health problems so that young people who are suffering don t get bullied for being different or weird. We want schools to help us deal with all the stresses of growing up, and help us to be strong for our future life as well as for our academic work. We want Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (PSHE) lessons to be compulsory. We want school inspections to look at how our schools are helping us to become strong and able to deal with our problems. We want schools to provide more support young people who are suffering stress, anxiety and depression, including access to counselling.

4 NO HELP Make your feelings loud Many of us find it really hard to cope and sometimes things get so bad we need to talk to someone who can help us. Often we don t know where to go to get help, and even if we do, many of us end up on long waiting lists, we have to wait months to get help and our problems become a crisis before we get it. When we go to the doctor or try and tell someone at school about our problems, they don t understand us and we feel really alone and don t know where to turn. NO WORK Fight for your future Having no work can make us feel worthless and like we have no future. We don t have structure or money. So many of us are struggling to find work and this can make us feel really down, depressed and anxious. We think it is terrible that a generation of young people is growing up in a world where not having a job is normal. We don t want to live our lives like this, getting one rejection letter after another makes us feel awful. 1 in 3 young people do not know where to get help when they feel depressed or anxious. 83% of young people want everyone who works in schools to know how to spot the signs a young person is struggling and how best to help them. Of the 2,000 young people we asked if you needed support what would be most important to you? the top issues were: I want to get help quickly when I need it and not have to wait. The support is provided somewhere where I feel comfortable and where I can get it easily. The person who supports me is someone I feel confident talking to and can be honest with. Raymond s story 72% of our young consultees want unemployed young people to get help to deal with the stress and upset caused by being out of work. Ever since I left college I have been applying for jobs but I just get one rejection letter after another; at first I could handle it but after a while it started to make me feel so unconfident, like I was a failure. Annie s story Since I became a teenager I have been really unhappy and have had severe mental health problems. I have self-harmed, struggled at school and my life at home has sometimes been like a war zone because I was desperately suffering and taking it out on my parents. When I first started to struggle, I didn t know what was going on and neither did other people. They thought I was acting up and being a typical teenager. I felt so alone. I have been admitted to hospital but onto an adult ward, not a children s ward because there were no beds available. I got help, but it was years after I started to struggle. I needed help early on, right at the start. I am campaigning to stop the cuts to young people s mental health services. This is happening to young people all around me and it makes us all feel like we have no future, like we are all on the scrapheap. I want to work because sitting at home all day is really isolating and I have started to feel so down recently. I just can t see how my future is going to get better with no job and no money. I am running out of hope. Young people deserve the chance to make their own way in the world, to get a job and become independent. We want more money so there are more young people s mental health services. We want everyone who works with children and young people to be trained to spot the signs that young people are struggling and need help. We want young people to get help right up to 25; it s no good if it just stops at 18. We may be grown up then but we still need support if we are suffering. We want young people at university who need help to get it as quickly as possible, and when they return home for the holidays for this help to carry on. We want to get help in places that are friendly and where you don t feel like you are going somewhere where you will be judged. We want online support services that are safe and don t make us feel patronised. We want the Government to create more opportunities for young people to build their skills and experience. We want mental health awareness training for Jobcentre staff and all those who come into contact with young people who are not in education, employment or training so they understand the impact of not having anything to do and no money. We want young people to have more places to go for support and help if they are struggling with their mental and emotional health as a result of not being in education, employment or training.

5 Stacey White, a YoungMinds Vs activist is asking YOU to take action. 5,600 young people have spoken out about our worries and concerns and what we want done about them. We are asking for help from heads of schools and teachers, of youth centres, of charities, of job centres, mental health services our parents and the government to make sure the things we have asked for in this document happen. We want change, we don t want to keep suffering in silence, feeling like no one is listening. This is our right. We hope you will do whatever you can by looking at what actions in this document are your responsibility and what you can change to make things better for us. Every small action will mean something to us. Thank you. Get involved Aged 11-25? You can get involved with the campaign online and in your community. Visit youngmindsvs.org.uk/getactive to find out about free campaign training days and more! Member of an organisation? Pledge Support - Sign the pledge at youngmindsvs.org.uk/organisations and in doing so, commit to taking action to support young people s mental health. Get Campaigning - Book the Fight the Pressure Campaign Training for the young people you work with. us at ymcampaigns@youngminds.org.uk for more information. Access training for professionals - To help you develop your knowledge and skills. Find out more at youngminds.org.uk/training_services. youngmindsvs.org.uk