Our Impact

The COVID-19 outbreak has caused an increase in anxiety in young people. The increases we have seen since the pandemic involve increased depressive disorders and suicidal ideation, and a marked increase in disordered eating and misdiagnosis of mental health issues rather than ASD.

Additionally, there are factors in people’s lives that might mean they have a harder time than others and we analyse these in order to create a service provision that better supports members of marginalised communities and disadvantaged groups.

The latest figures show that these lead factors can compound mental health issues for young people (February 2022). In order of those most reported are issues relating to the Autism Spectrum, Bullying, Relationship Breakdown in the home, Issues with Education, Domestic Violence in the Home, ADHD, Exam Stress, OCD and Sleep and Eating Issues.

We used goals-based (GBO) outcomes to chart progress with clients who see us for counselling. GBO works similarly to the principles of patient reported outcomes used in health, based on the concept that it is more powerful to measure the self-reported impact of an intervention against the service user’s own goals, rather than observed improvements or pre-determined measures/scoring tools. 

Our latest service user GBO results demonstrate improvements across the board for our top 10 goals most notably:

Anxiety & worry 31%
Low mood & depression 44%
Self-care 25%
Anger 45%
Education (attendance & performance) 26%
Eating disorders 30%
Self-harm 40%