7 minute read
THE DIFFERENCE MAKERS
Introducing the people behind Marylebone’s vital charities and community organisations: Ayla Mammadova, clinical lead for the Mind in Brent, Wandsworth & Westminster charity’s mental health support team
Interview: Jean-Paul Aubin-Parvu / Portraits: Orlando Gili
I’m what’s known as a ‘third culture kid’ – somebody who’s born in one country, grows up somewhere else, and then lives in a completely different place. That was me. I was born in Azerbaijan but grew up in the Middle East, and then lived in the United States. Now I’m here in London. Because of this, I have always been fascinated by people’s individual differences – by what it is that makes us us.
My biggest interest is in trying to help children and young people get through the massive changes they experience in life. I have been in this profession for many years, starting off at an adolescent inpatient psychiatric unit, then in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and also in forensics. I joined Mind in Brent, Wandsworth & Westminster as a clinical supervisor in January 2020, and became clinical lead in August 2021. Our team works across 33 schools in Westminster, some of which are in Marylebone – I lived there for nine years, so I know the area very well.
Our CEO, Simon Thompson, is passionate about ensuring that everybody gets the care they need. The Mental Health Support team was set up by the service manager Nada Calovska in response to the green paper that came out a couple of years ago saying that children and adolescent mental health services are failing. We shouldn’t be waiting for a crisis to develop before we offer help to young people. We should be helping them at the start, at the early intervention stage. That’s what we try to do.
We mostly focus on low mood, anxiety and challenging behaviour. When a referral comes to us, our team of educational mental health practitioners deliver cognitive behavioural therapy – usually six to eight sessions. As clinical lead I supervise the supervisors, who in turn supervise the practitioners. One day a week, I have a clinical day working with families.
Each of the schools we work with has a dedicated mental health lead who links in with our service. These are the professionals on the ground whose role it is to identify those children and young people who are struggling. We triage the referrals to see if we’re the bestplaced service for them; if we conclude that we’re not, we send them on to the right service.
For children aged between five and 11 with challenging behaviour and anxiety, our work is usually delivered through the parents – we try to equip them with the tools they need to support their child. The 11 to 18-year-olds we see often have challenges relating to low mood and anxiety, together with emotional dysregulation and the feeling of being out of place. For this age group we work directly with the young people, either in a group or one-to-one capacity.
We notice that a large proportion of referrals come during transition stages – children transitioning from primary to secondary school, or 16- to 18-year-olds who are approaching adulthood and confronting the big, pressurised life decisions that come around that age. That’s not to say that we don’t receive referrals from other year groups, but those are the two key ones. We have recently expanded our service to cater to the needs of children under the age of five, which is very exciting.
We also work closely with pupils, families and staff across the whole school to improve emotional wellbeing and provide mental health support. This is essentially a set of workshops catering to a wide range of different needs. For example, last year there was a very worrying Ofsted report published that outlined the unwanted sexual attention that adolescents receive, so we put together a workshop that tells young people what is and isn’t safe and what behaviours to report. We looked at cyber bullying, sexting and the sharing of inappropriate images. We hold forums where people at school can give us feedback and let us know what it is that they need, where there’s a gap, and then we deliver workshops to try to assist them with those things.
The pandemic has been very challenging, with a massive increase in referrals. More and more young people have been struggling and needing help. For children and young people struggling with low mood, lockdown took away their daily interactions with others, and those interactions are often vital for managing their distress. All of a sudden, that coping strategy went out of the window. It was particularly hard for those who have difficult relationships within their own household, where they were stuck inside. Things start to escalate. The pressures of falling behind academically because of not being able to attend classes also meant that lots of young people were feeling more anxious or experiencing low mood more.
As a result, we’ve noticed an increase in risk. Ours is an early intervention service and technically speaking we aren’t meant to be working with anyone who may be at risk to themselves – the idea is that they should receive support from CAMHS. But because CAMHS is working at full capacity dealing with the most extreme cases, we’ve had to adapt our practice and train up the workforce to ensure that we can also respond to young people who are feeling at risk, who are either selfharming or experiencing suicidal ideation.
It’s not just children, young people and parents who’ve struggled during the pandemic, but also the teachers and staff working at the schools. They’ve been working non-stop while also having to adapt their practices. Remember all the times when most of us could work from home? Well, teachers had no choice but to come into school. We know of teachers who couldn’t even see their own children, because they were living in other households, yet they had to come into school and work with other people’s children every day, while the virus was running wild. The fact that they had to work in bubbles meant that they couldn’t even really see their colleagues. It felt so lonely and very isolating.
One of our challenges is to shift the way that mental health difficulties are perceived in the world. We are trying to break the stigma and we’re trying to make it more apparent that mental health is as important as physical health. If you broke your leg, you would get the support you needed without a second thought, so you should definitely get the same level of support if you’re struggling with your mental health.
We are constantly moving with the times, just trying to ensure that the younger generations are prepared for this confusing, ever-changing world. We can’t ever know exactly what’s around the corner for them, but with our help at least they’ll be able to process some of those difficult feelings a little better. All we want is for them to be able to deal with the stresses that life throws at them as best they can.
MIND IN BRENT, WANDSWORTH & WESTMINSTER Hopkinson House, 6 Osbert Street, SW1P 2QU bwwmind.org.uk
