‘Not Making the Grade’ is a new report from UK mental health charity MIND.

The report has found that young people in the UK are:

1) unable to access mental health support.

2) having their mental health problems treated as bad behaviour. 

We agree with Mind’s recommendations that investment needs to be channeled into early support hubs and that there needs to be transformation in the approach to discipline in schools

...BUT we feel there needs to be a FAR greater emphasis and investment in educating parents to support their child/young person's healing too.

You can read the full report here: https://www.mind.org.uk/media/8852/not-making-the-grade.pdf

If you're the parent or guardian of a young person who self-harms, you can download the Youth Mental Health Foundation's free e-book, guiding you to support your child's recovery:  www.youthmentalhealthfoundation.org/e-book

We want to say a big thank you to Mel Stride MP for Central Devon, who invited our co-founder, Joel Sutton, to meet and discuss the state of young people's mental health in Devon.

Mel was particularly interested in why there has been such a dramatic increase in the number of young people self-harming in recent years and how parents, carers and family members can support a child/young person in crisis.

We're grateful for Mel's offer of support for our projects and fundraising going forward.

#SelfHarm #SelfHarmSupport #Parenting #Family #TheHorizonPlan #MentalHealth #TeenMentalHealth #MentalHealthSupport

It’s not surprising that many of the parents of self-harming young people that we help have problems sleeping. The stress, anxiety and worries about the future play on their minds and eat into their sleep.

Parents either tell us that they struggle to fall asleep or have restless sleep full of troubling dreams which mirrors their mental and emotional state.

Either way it’s so much harder to be calm, positive, patient, optimistic when your craving an opportunity to crawl into bed.

But how much sleep do we ACTUALLY NEED?

It’s commonly thought that 8 hours of sleep a night is the magic number.

And the evidence shows this is correct,

In one of many experiments, researchers took study participants into a laboratory with no sunlight or clocks and, at night, gave them nine-hour-long opportunity to sleep. The results were always the same: even when provided with more time, humans will typically spend an average of eight hours catching up on their Zzz.

So what happens...