Talking about Wellbeing

Over the last few years, concern for our emotional/mental wellbeing has increased significantly. This has led to many good things including better knowledge of how to support positive emotional wellbeing as well as care for our physical health.

We are now more aware than ever of the challenges that many young people face related to poor mental health and wellbeing. There is a growing weight of research evidence that shows how this current generation of young people are less content, and have poorer emotional wellbeing overall, than previous generations. Some of the evidence for this includes:

• Overall Life Satisfaction scores for 10-15 years old’s have decreased every year since 2010 (Understandingsociety.ac.uk).
• The % of 11-15 year old’s with a mental health diagnosis has increased significantly since 2004 (digitalnhs.uk).
• Rates of self-reported self-harm are increasing rapidly, and the rate of hospitalisations related to self-harm  and eating disorders have also steadily risen since 2015, and more rapidly from 2021.

In contrast to these negative trends, we know that youth work can be effective in supporting people to look after their wellbeing. So we decided to conduct a brief piece of our own research to get a snapshot of how our work with young people impacts their wellbeing. 101 young people who are regular attenders of our youth work answered our survey with the following results…

While only a brief snapshot of young people’s current views, this suggests that our youth work is playing a really positive role in supporting young people to care for their wellbeing, to feel more positive and build resilience to cope with challenges in life.