A Pioneering Partnership for Improved Mental Health Among Young People
We have just commenced a new partnership with CAMHS Digital Lab - the research group creating digital innovations that transform mental healthcare for children and young people. Working with Kings College London and the NHS, CAMHS Digital Lab are trying to develop research and then implement evidence-based solutions that can shorten wait lists and increase the quality of mental health care for young people.
Our partnership with CAMHS Digital Lab is intended to increase the volume of young people’s voice in the research that is developed and published, but not only that, we will be working together to make high quality media content that can unpack complex ideas in a way that diverse audiences can relate to and understand. Our media production trainees will be producing films, documentaries, social media content and other media assets that tell the stories of this important research and what it means for the future of mental healthcare.
By creating media together, ESA Academy and CAMHS Digital Lab will be pioneering mental health and research content created by young people, for young people.
ESA is so delighted to be part of this partnership for three very good reasons:
The content we will be producing with and for CAMHS Digital Lab will be diverse across genres, skills and platforms. We will learn a lot and we will be able to deploy students across our different departments including script writing, graphics, animation, post production, art department, sound recording, content creation and distribution.
Our students will be working with highly capable and credible experts and developing knowledge and insight of innovative research practices. Both students and researchers will collaborate, developing soft skills and communication strategies for new and diverse audiences.
ESA is right at the centre of a current crisis in young people’s mental health. We share a vision to support young people to flourish safely with strong, resilient emotional and mental health. We already grapple with these issues in our own community and curriculum provision and we feel fortunate to have the opportunity to collaborate in this way with CAMHS digital lab to more widely impact improvements in young peoples mental healthcare.
Here are some stills from our first film, produced as part of this partnership… watch this space, the full film is scheduled for release in a few weeks.
This is one of those partnerships that feels so well aligned to our vision and culture.
ESA has a unique educational context. We are a Creative Arts specialist college. Emotional and mental health is a big area of interest here. Responding to poor mental health and supporting students who are stressed or vulnerable to mental health problems is a real concern within our community. There are a few reasons for this.
Firstly, It’s in our very purpose to see and imagine things differently, to be eccentric, daring, to question and innovate, to risk failing, to try and find a new way of expressing an idea.
The radical psychiatrist RD Laing was interested in the arts because he saw them as a place where conformity and ordinariness could be challenged, where dominant norms could be questioned and even dismantled. That is one reason why he ended up very interested in the ideas of sanity and ‘madness’ because the people who ‘normal’ society painted as mad were often the most alternative and creative. So maybe it is no surprise that ESA [the creative academy for the culture industry] is full of young people who are innovative, risk takers, keen to see and experience the world differently, willing to risk a little ‘crazy’, to be misunderstood, to be alternative, odd even, in the pursuit of innovation and creative originality. We are an attractive school to the free spirits who often feel at odds with the norms and orthodoxies of our more ‘normal’ and standardised world.
Another reason why social, emotional and mental health [SEMH] issues are a big deal for our community is because we are a diverse place. Not only in terms of ethnicity and gender and sexuality but also in terms of neurodiversity.
Minority stress is real and people from minority groups are more vulnerable to emotional and mental health issues. Some of the crafts and trades we teach here are particularly well populated by students with neurodiverse conditions. Games design and digital development, performing arts, sound engineering and post production are all well loved subjects by our neurodiverse trainees. These students who often have diagnoses such as ASC, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia think differently to others and each other. They are also more likely to find social situations challenging and these students may feel heightened anxiety or low mood, they may find some environments overly stimulating or uninviting or they find communicating confusing, difficult or scary. Being neurodiverse does not necessarily mean that you have SEMH issues too but there is often a correlation because being neurodivergent is stressful at times and you may not feel like you fit in, which can be isolating and scary. At ESA we have invested in building ‘RECONNECT’ spaces and social communication workshops. We have collaborated with our neurodiverse trainees to try and make sensory environments for neurodiverse individuals that are designed to be inclusive and accommodating.
Finally, a significant number of students come to us at age 14 because they have struggled to make it in traditional schooling. Many have had very low attendance and feel misunderstood or undervalued. They may think they are failures of our standardised educational orthodoxy.
We call this group our ‘re-engagement’ group. They often make up 40% or so of our 14 to 16 cohort. They are great young people but when they get to us, their confidence is low, they have often become become ‘persistent absentees’ with very low attendance to school and they have become unhappy and demotivated. Some have been excluded from school previously, others have simply dropped out, still more have hidden in plain sight, withdrawing, under achieving and becoming disengaged. When you feel unliked by a big institution that doesn’t really know you, when your mood and motivation drops out, when you star to believe horrible things about yourself like ‘I’m stupid’ or ‘I’m a failure’, this can become very negative and damaging to your mental and emotional health. It takes us a lot of time and effort to rebuild trust with these students. To repair and recover the damage done by low confidence and build back up these students’ curiosity, commitment and self compassion. Only then can we see them flourish, find and express their own unique creative voice and then find their thing, establish their craft and begin making exciting contributions. Our relational and restorative approach to pedagogy, our super pastoral team and our character curriculum are crucial to this re-engagement agenda.
All to often, traditional schools can become punitive and even institutionally hostile to young people who are struggling to engage with a standardised and impersonal system of education, this can create a downward spiral of low confidence, increased anxiety, low attendance and deteriorating mental health. As the late great Sir Ken Robinson would advocate so passionately, all too often we anaesthetise young people to get them through institutional education. We deaden them to everything that would compete for their attention, for fear they will be distracted from an often boring curriculum. The arts are an aesthetic education, they are the remedy to this anaesthetic affect, the arts wake us up to joy and vitality and engagement.
I can’t wait for this partnership to get going.
The mental health crisis for young people is HUGE - it’s at unprecedented levels and that is not hyperbole. 1.2 million young people are out of work. The Sutton Trust have reported that over half of young people are experiencing mental health problems and those who do are 5 times more likely to be out of work and face economic hardship. CAMHS and youth services can not meet this enormous need. Schools must become places that adopt research informed practices that improve mental health in our young people. To do this, they need the research data and they need to know what interventions to implement and how to ensure effective impact. This is exactly the aim of the partnership with CAMHS Digital Lab. What an important opportunity for our students and their families, not only are we going to collaborate with researchers to help produce meaningful research outcomes, not only are we going to make high value content that communicates this research, we also get to continue and enrich our journey towards being a socially, emotionally and mentally healthy community that supports recovery, re-engagement and preemptive interventions that reduce and prevent mental health problems before and as they emerge.
