We know the gap between the number of young people reaching out for support and the support available is widening all the time. While we and the wider mental health sector are already providing a range of services, we fiercely believe that digital innovation will bring new solutions for young people who are currently being missed.
When young people find us online, it can be because of an incredibly wide range of situations. They might be in crisis, desperate to know where they can get urgent help. They might have experienced something traumatic that they’re trying to process. They may have been prescribed medication and feel unsure about what it means. Or they may be feeling alone with difficult or confusing feelings. However they reach us, our digital information and advice aims to support young people to feel more hopeful about their situation and find a practical next step to take. We want to make sure young people never feel alone.
Every young person who needs us can find us quickly and easily.
Every young person we engage with feels more hopeful about their mental health and can do something positive to improve their situation.
Every young person who wants to be a source of support to their friends can come to us to gain the skills and confidence to do so.
Last year, our information and support pages for young people were viewed 2,591,978 times. That’s more than 2.5 million times that we’ve been there for a young person when they needed help.
Young people were on our pages for an average of nearly two minutes, showing how engaged they are with our content and that it's the type of content they are looking for.
We also published 13 new or revised web guides for young people last year, including a guide on money and mental health to help support young people with the cost-of-living crisis.
All this led to 74% of young people telling us that our information and advice had helped them to feel more hopeful about their situation.
Our powerful social channels again saw fantastic levels of growth in followers and engagement. They continue to be vital for us to be there for young people in their chosen digital space.
Our Instagram is our primary young people-facing channel.
Our TikTok channel is becoming more crucial in helping us reach a larger and more engaged audience as we respond to young people’s preference for video content.
With funding from The Prudence Trust, we took on the challenge of identifying gaps in mental health support services and finding ways to fill them. We focused on Black young people because we know that as a group they are more likely to struggle with their mental health and less likely to find early support that works for them.
Working alongside Black young people, the initial discovery phase of the project has prototyped six possible new service models. These cover areas of creative expression, self-reflection and peer support. These models will be explored and tested next year, leading to potentially brand new areas of life-changing support for young people.
While our support is designed to be inclusive and accessible to all, we felt that some young people might only feel seen and recognised by us when we speak to their specific needs and issues.
This led to our work alongside the fantastic Muslim Youth Helpline to create a mental health campaign by young Muslims, for young Muslims. It's the first of its kind on this scale and the results were really positive.
The campaign had 130,814 engagements on social media.
The campaign video had 761,317 views.
88% of people who responded to our survey about the guides said they found them helpful.
Take a look at our faith-friendly information and advice, shaped by the voices of young Muslims.
Read our faith-friendly guide to self-care for young Muslims.
Read our guide to Islamophobia and mental health.
We also launched a self-care campaign to help young people navigate the overwhelming amount of self-care content out there, and reassure them there is no ‘right way’ to practise self-care. Our campaign helped young people to find ways to understand and use self-care that worked for them – with our main campaign video reaching 401,000 views.
Throughout the last 12 months, the Britain Get Talking campaign continued to support young people, encouraging everyone to engage with mental health and to become better active listeners. This included the most successful advert of the campaign to date, featuring an emotional conversation between a father and his daughter.
This year we launched our brand new YoungMinds Writers Programme. We wanted to provide ongoing training and support for aspiring young writers, as well as use our brand to elevate the efforts of young people from under-represented backgrounds, or those with experiences that are often overlooked.
13 young people took part, producing brilliant writing on grief and loss, racism, drugs and alcohol, ADHD and panic attacks. They also wrote and edited their own zine, which was published in July this year.
Young people tell us it’s incredibly important to hear directly from others who’ve been through what they’re experiencing. This year, the YoungMinds blog continued to provide a place for young people to be able to get peer-to-peer advice, connect and inspire other young people.