HELP (Health Educators Leading Parents)

Background & Rationale:

There is increasing concern in Ireland as to worrying trends relating to mental health difficulties in children and young people. There is a perception that young people nowadays are more prone to experiencing these difficulties than was the case in previous generations. Over the same time-frame there has been an increased focus on primary and secondary school students being taught about ‘feelings’ and ‘mental health’. Given that the apparent increase in population level mental health difficulties has mirrored the timespan during which these components have become more commonplace in schools, the question is, what is the direction of causality? With any intervention, we must ensure that ‘we first do no harm’. When unevidenced mental health programmes are delivered at scale across entire school districts, the potential for harm is very real.

However, due to lack of funding for well-designed research programmes in child and adolescent mental health in Ireland, the available data is very unclear and inconsistent. A particular challenge is that ‘mental health difficulties’ are very poorly defined in many studies; the phrase itself means many different things to different people. This has led to a situation where, for example, normative anxiety and mood responses are being wrongly labelled as pathological and conversely atypical levels of depressed mood dismissed as ‘sure that’s teenagers’. This basic error leads to multiple concerning sequelae – not least of which is a failure to accurately characterise mental illness and by extension to adequately respond and resource appropriate treatment. As a teenage participant in one of our studies said, lumping all forms of transitory emotional upset with serious mental illness in children and young people was ‘like comparing a cold to having cancer’. The stark reality of this widespread misunderstanding is profound. Using this analogy, it is readily understandable how a parent of a child with ‘normal’ anxiety or mood changes may unnecessarily stress and worry about their child (or vice versa) compounding the underlying issue – an anxious parent in this context is generally a less assured parent while a parent unaware of their child’s challenges may inadvertently delay treatment. More and more parental anxieties in regard to their children’s mental health are occurring against the backdrop of increased media discussion of suicide. In many consultations it is the elephant in the room, this unspoken fear, indeed terror, fuelled by ill-informed public discourse.

The research literature aligns with clinical experience to indicate that one of the most constructive inputs for children and young people with mental health difficulties is to provide their parents/carers with accurate, accessible information on the relevant issues to empower parents/carers towards appropriate, effective action. Many parents identify this at a turning point in their child’s journey to recovery.

Cycle Against Suicide’s HELP Programme (Health Educators Leading Parents), is a collaboration between Cycle Against Suicide, clinical experts at the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at University College Dublin (UCD) and parents. Upon completion, this state-of-the-art, evidence-based Reusable Learning Toolkit that enable parents better support anxiety in children and young people.