Mental health has always been a very taboo conversation and one we often don’t have nearly enough. We may ask those around us “how are you” from time to time but most of us will respond “ok thanks” without even giving it a second of thought and it’s time we move the conversation deeper and really check how our friends and family are doing. The stigma around mental health remains high and mental ill health is becoming increasingly prevalent in young people. It’s important we educate ourselves, be conscious of our deep emotions and ensure that we feel able to seek support when we need to.

I had the pleasure and privilege to speak to Dr Nihara Krause, a clinical psychologist and founder of mental health charity Stem4, about supporting our friends, maintaining positive wellbeing, de-stigmatising mental health and to discuss the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on mental health in young people across the country. Dr Krause founded Stem4 in 2011 after a teenager in a school local to where she lives and works lost her life to an eating disorder and she got involved in looking at how the whole school community could be supported and to provide helpful information & advice. The charity is very versatile and covers a wide range of work such as providing face to face work on mental health education to a variety of audiences, while also creating digital apps (3 for young people and one for those supporting a young person) with a fifth one for eating disorders on the way. Stem4 also help to advise schools & inform government to help them with policy-making decisions. The charity’s emphasis is very much on early intervention and being mindful of warning signs to access help as soon as is required. Please visit their website https://stem4.org.uk to find out more about their work and how to find the apps.

 

My interview with her can be found below:

 

1. How can we support our friends in their mental health struggles?

Our connections are the most important thing for anyone. Being around for a friend, noticing maybe that they’re going through a difficult time and offering them the opportunity to do something as they may not want to chat straight away. Friends change when they’re going through a difficult time, it’s important to try not to be upset or hurt by it as they may be more withdrawn. Try to look after your own mental health as well, be careful not to overextend your friendship so that you start to become almost like their counsellor. The next step could be to helping them to access support and pointing them in the direction of help, but primarily just being there for a friend.

 

2. How can we help to remove the stigma around mental health?

Already, there’s change because people are far more open in discussing mental health. We need more communication, more awareness and more education in schools and more involvement of parents. We must have a national focus, where mental health has the same degree of parity as physical health. I also think that we should see mental health as something we all experience, we all have mental health so we can all also have mental ill health in the same way we can have physical ill health. There’s been miseducation for a long time now where people see mental illness as not coping properly or somehow being weak in some way, when about 70% of mental illness is genetically coded. We shouldn’t treat it as a personal vulnerability or a weakness issue because it isn’t. Opening family discussions are key in tackling the stigma and although this may be uncomfortable to begin with, starting with light conversations can help to normalise talking about your feelings more often.

 

3. How do you think the pandemic has affected adolescent mental health?

We won’t know completely the impact of the pandemic for at least the next five years, but some of the figures we have indicate that mental ill health in young people has increased. Pre-pandemic, the figures showed 1 in 9 young people aged between 5-19 were presenting with mental ill health difficulties, with the main two being anxiety and depression. That 1 in 9 figure has become 1 in 6 since the start of the pandemic, with depression and anxiety the highest two in those figures also. Depression is of great concern as it was escalating worldwide before Covid and now there’s a big worry how that is going to affect the general population as we see a strong correlation between clinical depression and suicide, which has increased also in the pandemic. Eating disorders have also increased massively and that could be because those who needed treatment couldn’t access it and also that good monitoring from school or peers has dropped off. So, all mental health conditions have increased as far as we know.

 

4. What strategies can we adopt to look after our mental health daily?

All the sort of good stuff you hear at school really. It goes without saying that if we look after our physical health, that will help our mental health too. Eat well and regularly, having a good sleep routine, resting is an important element in your physical health and in general know your body- if you think it’s not functioning how in the exact way it should do then go and get a check-up. It’s important to keep up certain amounts of activity, exercise helps to boost mental health in different ways: whether that be sport or art or drama or even mindfulness. Anything that helps you to manage your stress better is good daily and to also manage your workload to try and spread it out because procrastinating can cause unnecessary stress. Connecting with friends is crucial and listening to music is also proven to helping you to relax. I’m a real advocate of knowing your emotions and how to deal with them. Our emotions can lead to exaggerating or triggering mental ill health and trying to understand yourself and what the root cause of our feelings are can be an essential strategy we can adopt. It’s helpful to consider if it is a circumstantial, temporary feeling or if it is an expression of something deeper that you don’t know how to express or deal with.

 

5. Is there anything we can do more of to help tackle the winter seasonal lows more commonly experienced?

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. Some of us seem to be more vulnerable to a condition called SAD, seasonal affective disorder, and that’s to do with the amount of light received through our retina and the breakdown of certain chemicals. If that’s you or you just generally feel lower in the winter period, I’d recommend trying to make the most of daylight hours so it might be that you need to try and get up earlier. Also, for many people, winter can be a real time of loneliness where many people don’t want to go out or there’s less going on so maybe see if you can connect and connect in a different way. And another thing I think obviously is that we need to eat better in the winter as we lose more energy so just look at how you keep yourself well.

 

6. If you had one message for our readers, what would it be?

There is enormous value in picking up on mental ill health early and the earlier you get to something, the quicker you can change it. There are some really good treatment strategies and there’s no reason that that mental ill health has to follow you for the rest of your life. But get in there early, get some support and get back on track.