New campaign encouraged thousands more to speak up
Recently, I wrote in this column about a new Childline campaign aimed at helping boys and young men speak out about their mental health.
The We All Feel It campaign was intended to encourage boys across the North East and throughout the United Kingdom who might not previously have contacted us about their mental health to use the Childline website or contact our counsellors rather than “bottle up” their problems and pretend everything is fine.
The campaign was launched after Childline counsellors carried out 31,899 counselling sessions in 2020/21 with girls about mental health issues compared with 5,622 with boys.
We also delivered 11,719 counselling sessions about suicidal thoughts and feelings with girls but just 1,592 with boys.
However, despite fewer boys than girls talking to Childline about feeling suicidal, the latest national data for registered deaths in England and Wales shows 122 boys, aged 10 to 19 years of age, died by suicide. In the same year 52 girls took their life.
This week, we can reveal that almost 9,000 new visitors to our website took to the We All Feel It campaign page and that during the first three days of the campaign, We All Feel It accounted for roughly 20% of all visits to the Childline website.
Not only that, but the Childline web pages which are there offering support and advice on mental health were visited by more than 20,000 people, around half of whom were new users.
Demand for Childline counsellors over the phone rose by 14% during the campaign, and the number of young people who wanted to speak to our counsellors via email rose by 12%.
These are big numbers, but show that young people across the region and the country who have been through a challenging few years while also dealing with the everyday difficulties of adolescence, are clearly reaching out for support.
We must do whatever we can to give them the confidence to seek the support they need.
Let your children know they can speak to you about anything that’s worrying them.
However, if they don’t feel comfortable with that, Childline will always be here for them too.