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The Adolescent Mental Health Training Initiative
(1996-2001)

Background

Since its inception, TSA has always had a strong interest in issues of mental health and emotional well being. This had influenced the content of a series of audio-cassette packs for parents (including topics such as stress and suicide and self harm). TSA’s training packs for staff working with young people in custody has included much about young people and mental health.

Department of Health funding in 1996 enabled TSA to expand its training work in the field of young people's emotional well-being. The programme set out to support people to work sensitively and effectively with adolescents in general, and vulnerable young people in particular. It offered training and consultancy to support workers, to increase knowledge and confidence, disseminate current research, reduce professional isolation and develop skills in work with young people, their families and carers.

Short courses

The Adolescent mental health initiative developed and delivered short courses on:

• Adolescent mental health
• Suicide and Self Harm
• Working with Depressed young people.

The project also delivered a range of tailor-made courses to agencies for teachers, doctors, social workers, police officers, youth workers, youth offending teams and for community based agencies such as youth counselling services. Respect and empowerment of young people and their direct involvement in courses, conferences and the development of training materials are key principles of the programme.

Interdisciplinary conferences - Young people and mental health

Conferences were run between 1997 and 2000 in Leeds, Bradford, Dorset, Weston Super Mare, Newcastle, London, Manchester, and Derby. In these conferences, local agencies were brought together to discuss the issues with national and local speakers. The conferences included a range of presentations from young people involved in the TSA Youth Voice project, which aimed to get young peoples views on mental health across to adults. In some areas links between local agencies were supported after the conferences.

Training conferences

Conferences took place in London, Belfast, Bristol and Edinburgh and workshops were presented at other smaller events. They included national and local presentations and participation by parents of young people who had completed suicide. In 2002 a manual for professionals, Young People: Suicide and Self Harm is being published. The project also ran biennial conferences on a range of mental health topics aimed at youth counsellors.

Counselling : The Tudor Trust and the Talk2 project

These projects developed the mental health training into the fields of interpersonal skills,counselling skills and supervision for counsellors and support workers with young people. More detail is available on the Someone to Talk to (TALK2) Project information on this site. Training from this project covered self-image and self-esteem, choices and decision-making, working with distressed young people, listening and communicating, supervision of counsellors of young people and managerial supervision of support workers with young people in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Peer support

In 2002 a two-day course on setting up peer support projects' was designed and delivered in Scotland and London. This led to the development of a manual written by Marilyn McGowan aimed at teachers, counsellors and youth workers wishing to set up a service. This guide contains chapters on the context of the service of the training exercises and sample materials and is obtainable from TSA publications.

Training for mentors of school age pupils.

This training has been devised and delivered for the African and African Caribbean People's Advisory Group in East Croydon. Adult mentors give their time to school age pupils who may be in danger of exclusion. The training included listening and counselling skills, creative techniques to use with young people, ethical issues and case discussion.

Project workers

Dr John Coleman, Juliet Lyon, Josie Melia , Marilyn McGowan and Dorothy Eddi Piper were all involved in this project.

More information:
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