In acknowledgment of Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK, 14-20 May 2018, ELBA took the opportunity to speak to community champion, Marie McLeod who set up the organisation Depression Changes Minds, to hear about the great work it does around supporting parents of young people who experience ill mental health. Find out more below:

What does your charity do?
We support parent/carers and the families of children and young people that suffer from mental health illnesses.

We run workshops in schools for parents, highlighting signs and symptoms of mental health illnesses. We give them the tools to help identify difficulties within their children’s lives, giving the parents the confidence to communicate with professionals effectively.

We also run workshops in schools, that have recently won a UK-wide award, to provide self care for parents and young people in order to help prevent further health challenges.

What challenges are there in east London with regards to mental health?
There is a large range of difficulties facing our young people and the people that care for them within east London. This ranges from school pressures, social media pressures, family life, poverty, physical difficulties and cuts to our education and NHS services.

We are also facing cuts to our parental engagement and youth offending service, that will bring further difficulties to an already very stretched support network.

We also face cultural and social division within east London due to the diverse population that needs a substantial amount of awareness, attention and delicate handling.

Do you have an inspirational story/moment about your work you would like to share?
As a young person I suffered from depression myself. Unfortunately it went undiagnosed until, as a young mum at 19, I was ill with postnatal depression.

I have always been involved as much as possible in the children’s nurseries/schools as a governor, running parent coffee mornings, and my passion is to include other parents and the local community as much as possible in their children’s education, to bring an all-round support system for our children.

3 years ago, our eldest son was diagnosed with severe depression after trying to take his own life twice.

He struggled with self-harming, weight loss and anxiety attacks. It got so bad that we decided we had to pull him from education and his GCSE’s. He was then under the care of CAMHS (NHS’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) and had professional and medical help.

It took a great strain on us as a family, and as I was caring for him full-time, I tried to find a support group for parents as it felt quite a lonely and confusing time as Mum/parents. I couldn’t find one that helped parents with children that had mental health issues, so I decided that, as depression in children was on the increase, there must be other parents going through this struggle. After all, as parents, when our children are babies, we go to ‘mother and baby’ groups so why not seek the same support with teenagers. So, I set up and advertised my first group meeting in the local area and CAMHS.

I set up the group with the initial idea just to meet with other parents, but after seeing how our services are so desperately under staffed throughout east London, with parents and children not getting the continued support they need, this has made my vision grow. As I have said previously I facilitate support groups, I work with parents and teenagers on one-to-one coaching and we have recently undertaken our first recovery retreat for parents and young people, with the vision to be in all schools across east London with workshops in schools to highlight signs and symptoms of anxiety and depression. I also see Depression Changes Minds having its own retreat to take parents and young people to, for therapies including art, music, nature and animals, with continued care back in east London.

I intend to keep working towards these goals and helping those families suffering with childhood depression for as long as I can be of help to others going through difficult life experiences with mental health.

What challenges is your organisation facing?
The organisation itself is facing workload challenges and financial difficulties, along with the lack of engagement with some schools.

Depression Changes Minds is a small organisation and we are continually finding it difficult to keep up with the day to day running of it, along with the need for face to face work with the families.

We have also had difficulties getting secondary schools to engage with the work we are doing as, generally, secondary schools have a much smaller engagement with parents than primary schools, and although it is great to get contact with parents whilst the children are young, our belief is that schools could be doing more to engage with parents on this and look at the all round care of our young people.

I have also been running this on a purely voluntary basis for around 3 years now and am finding it increasingly difficult as there is now the workload for several paid positions, but currently neither the finances nor the people.