More Youths Accessing Counselling Services
ALautoka-based counselling service organisation has noted the increased number of youths accessing its counselling services.
The organisation, Mending Minds Foundation (MMF), which was launched last year, is led by founder and executive director, Prem Singh. Ms Singh said it was positive to see that the youth were becoming more vocal and accessing the support line they needed.
“So youths, I mean like from the age of 15 to roughly say 26 or 28, they’ve been reaching out in terms of stress management, anger management, relationship issues, family issues, marital concerns, violence, infidelity, financial crisis and unemployment and suicidal ideations thinking,” Ms Singh said.
“So part of our service delivery is also suicide prevention work, I think it has been quite a challenge for the past four years actually.” She said MMF was not only about providing therapeutic services, but the counselors were also trainers and advocates.
“So if there are any organisations that would like to know more about certain things in mental health or child protection or gender-based violence related work we are here to provide training, one-on-one training, group training, not just training for a couple of days or a one day we do short courses as well, we do awareness sessions too,” she said. “We are targeting communities at all levels from grassroots to policymaking and lobbying and so forth.”
Monitor children’s social media use
Ms Singh is also urging parents to look at the long-term impacts of exposing children to the freedom of using social media attended or unmonitored. She made this plea after coming across a number of cases of bullying on social media in Fiji. Ms Singh said this was where the issue of child-protection came in. She noted the top four issues faced by people coming into MMF for counseling, rating it from the highest to the lowest - mental health support, child protection, genderbased violence and alcohol or other drugs (AOD) abuse/misuse. “Gender-based violence can be domestic violence most definitely and intimate partner violence and in child protection cases it’s not just physical abuse for kids, but also sexual abuse as well and bullying,” Ms Singh said.
“Nobody talks about bullying these days, yet it’s happening and I’m concerned about social media bullying in Fiji Islands, such a small country.
“Kids are pushed to a point where parents don’t know what the young girls are doing in their rooms.”
She said that when it comes to dealing with children and social media, parental monitoring is important.
“We give them privacy, they have an account, but you have to decide how old is your child; are they allowed to have a TikTok account, to have a Facebook account, this is where the issues start,” she said. “If you’re involved in your child’s social life, you would have more information about how things impact them and what they are actually doing out there.”