supporting troubled children
Sometimes, when life pushes you right over the edge and leaves you dangling by your fingertips, you find yourself wondering if you will ever clamber back to safety...
For troubled children, those with emotional, behavioural and mental health issues, the challenges of coping with everyday life can seem doubly frightening and confusing. Often these children respond to their experiences in ways that seem damaging and can be hard for people to understand or respond to.
Spurgeons offers early intervention support for troubled children, often in collaboration with other agencies and professionals.
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After an initial assessment period, our teams work closely with children and their families. Together they aim to get to grips with the issues, to build self-confidence and self-esteem and to find solutions to vicious cycles of problems and behaviours.
Ongoing care for troubled children helps to provide rules, boundaries and crisis intervention if needed. By helping parents to gain a better understanding of their child’s needs they can positively address mental health challenges. This can stop issues from escalating and prevent future problems before they arise.
fast facts
fast facts about troubled children
- One in ten children between the ages of one and fifteen has a mental health disorder.[1]
- Approximately twenty-percent of children have a mental health problem in any given year and about ten-percent at any one time.
- Rates of mental health problems increase as children reach adolescence.
- The mental health charity Mind estimates that one in ten children aged fifteen to sixteen has self-harmed, usually by cutting themselves.
[1] All statistics courtesy of The Mental Health Foundation
get personal
I was 13 when I first started harming myself. I felt totally out of control. My parents were getting divorced and all my friends had their own problems. I had no-one to talk to so I kept quiet.
When I first cut myself I’d had a huge bust-up with my dad. I don’t even really know how the thought came into my head but it did, it sort of felt like it wasn’t me doing it...Like I was watching myself from outside of my own body. At first it felt good. I know that sounds really strange. The pain of cutting myself somehow distracted me from the pressure that felt like it was going to explode inside me.
Every time I felt angry or stressed or sad I would cut myself. I really hated it and felt like a freak but it was like an addiction and somehow it was also my weird way of coping. When I ended up in hospital, my parents finally noticed how bad things had got for me. They’d been so busy with their own problems they hadn’t seen what was happening to me.
I started to see a counsellor who helped me think of things I could do to stop my stress from getting too much for me. I was self-harming less and less and had other ways of getting through the stress. I’ve just turned 19 and haven’t cut myself for ages.
I’ll always have the scars but I realise now that I am not a weak person. I am a strong person and I can cope.
I know there are loads of kids out there doing what I did. I really hope they will have the guts to tell someone what they are doing so they can get the help to make things better. ‘Josh’, aged 19