Welcome to Talk2Nish.com, which celebrates the importance of listening and being listened to, something Anisha Vidal-Garner, the inspiration for the site, excelled at.
Talk2Nish Peer Mentors is a peer to peer wellbeing mentoring programme for secondary schools. It involves training school staff and students to deal with students’ wellbeing issues, to talk to them in the first instance and signpost them to help and advice. It functions similar to a mental health first aid programme in the workplace which trains employees to recognise the crucial warning signs of mental ill health and feel confident to guide someone to appropriate support. Such schemes have been growing over the past couple of years and many employers from WH Smith to Capgemini and Sky now operate a mental health first aid scheme or have mental health champions or ambassadors.
It makes a great deal of sense to extend this to secondary schools where mental health problems are so rife and where the resources to tackle them are few. In this context we believe a mentoring programme will work best. This has been operated in other regions, such as Kent, and it means students can build a relationship of trust so that they can more easily ask for the help they need.
The idea is that young people may be more likely to talk about some of their problems to peers rather than authority figures such as teachers in the first instance. The programme will also encourage greater awareness in the school of mental health issues generally and of the issues that contribute to mental health problems, help reduce associated stigma, lead to increased self esteem and boost problem-solving skills and could reduce absence levels and improve academic performance.
Covid has foregrounded mental health, but mental health problems have been increasing for many years, particularly among young people, with the World Health Organization saying that depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide. Mind says that in 2018-19 24% of 17-year-olds reported having self-harmed in the previous year, and seven per cent reported having self-harmed with suicidal intent at some point in their lives. 16% reported high levels of psychological distress. Moreover, the number of A&E attendances by young people aged 18 or under with a recorded diagnosis of a psychiatric condition more than tripled between 2010 and 2018-19.
Schools have often not had the resources to provide adequate services, particularly at a time when their overall budgets have been cut. Between 2010 and 2019 the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates overall school funding fell by 8% in real terms. In 2017, an inquiry by the health and education select committees found that schools were cutting mental health services such as counsellors and pastoral provision to cover funding gaps and called on the government to look at the impact of budget cuts on mental health services for children. While there may be more post-Covid funding for schools, it is highly likely that it will fall short of addressing the full extent of the mental health crisis among young people.
We will be posting content regularly about what our peer mentors are doing and about fundraising events we are holding. Look out for more soon.

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