April 8, 2025
We were back at New Radcliffe House again for our Spring Team Meeting, catching up with the teams across Mental Health in Development and sharing our progress so far.
This month’s meeting was particularly looking at the role of lived experience in research around youth mental health and how we can involve parents and carers in a meaningful way. A key part of our mission is to understand better the wants and experiences of young people and their families, so understanding the barriers and bridges to increasing lived experience participation is of vital importance.
We heard updates from each of the teams. The WISDOM project discussed their recent work in schools on mental health and diversity. They noted cultural differences can lead to barriers in families understanding or accepting their children’s mental health problems. There is a need for more culturally appropriate mental health resources.
Although the majority of schools had high concerns over children with anxieties and worry or who were suffering from low mood or depression, they reported that they did not necessarily feel any need for further information in managing or supporting these. Instead, they wanted more information or advice in different areas.
Primary schools wanted help with:
Secondary schools wanted help with:
Both sectors responded that the biggest challenge to being involved in research was staff capacity and availability. Staff also raised issues around accessing external professional support, with too many services expecting schools to deal with these mental health problems. Schools explained that they were out of their depth in this area and lacked the funding to do it well. They also referred to challenges accessing mental health support when also neuro-divergent.
We also heard from Nikki Chapman, the Parent/Carer Lived Experience Lead at the Charlie Waller Trust. We have been working with her to develop our Parent and Carer Research Network which has now launched. She gave a presentation on the Power and Potential of Parents and Carers in Children and Youth People’s Mental Health.
She introduced the work of the Charlie Waller Trust and talked about the things that families are holding every day (e.g. managing a home, work, extended family, self-care, social life and interests). These were represented by balloons which she asked one of our team members to hold. When the additional ‘balloon’ of their child’s mental health difficulties was added, the balloons became more difficult to hold.
She observed that the first balloon to get dropped is often self-care since the parent or carer may feel that it will affect the fewest people but of course this is not true. The ‘child’s mental health’ balloon often comes with an additional accompanying balloon of ‘stigma and parent blaming’ which can lead to the social life balloon also being dropped. This can lead to the parent becoming very isolated.
Nikki also invited us to play a true or false game where team members had to guess whether various comments had been made to the parent or carer of a child with mental health issues. This invited us to consider how parents may have become defensive and are thus less likely to engage. This can lead to further barriers around participating in research. If we want to partner with parents and carers, we must make clear that we are not here to judge but rather to come alongside and to understand.