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Over 12% of children have a diagnosable mental illness, and 75% of adult mental illnesses begin in childhood. But lives can be transformed by equipping parents with vital knowledge and skills to facilitate self-help for prevention and early treatment.
Family Mental Wealth, a social enterprise, works with academic and clinical centres to create evidence-based resources which empower parents to build the mental health of their children through family-based pro-active self-help.
On this week’s episode, Rich and Gabby sit down with Nick Pollard to learn more about the incredible work he does championing mental health around the country.
Meet Nick
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Nick’s inspiration for Family Mental Wealth began from his own story of when he supported his own daughter through an extraordinarily difficult time of mental ill-health. To do this he drew upon evidence-based insights from academic and clinical experts alike
Thus, Family Mental Wealth was born.
Their mission is to play a significant role in radically transforming mental health provision for children and young people through digital tools to facilitate family-based self-help, appropriately integrated with educational and clinical support.
Nick now dedicates his time to showing families how to build the mental health and well-being of their children. He does this with the Headway: Parent Toolkit to enable parents and carers to develop vital knowledge and skills to help their children build mentally healthy lives. It is currently available as an online eLearning resource but will be integrated into the Headway app..
About Headway
Many young people wait a long time to receive the help they need for their mental health. But the evidence shows that if they, and their parents or carers, are provided with suitable knowledge, skills, and tools, then these young people can do a lot themselves to build mentally healthy lives, reducing the risk of mental ill-health.
So, in co-operation with clinicians and researchers at the South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, they are developing Headway. This is a digital tool that will facilitate family-based self-help, appropriately integrated with clinical support in Primary Care.
Headway provides:
for parents and carers: knowledge and skills which will enable them to help their child; and Insight Tools to help them identify risk factors that might lead to mental ill-health in their child.
for children and young people: Therapeutic Activities that will help the child to reduce the impact of these risk factors, and build a mentally healthy life.
Our vision is to help as many children and young people as possible. Nick Pollard, Director, Family Mental Wealth
Listen to the full episode here
To hear more of the conversation with Nick listen now using the links below!
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Published on 16 March 2023, last updated on 16 March 2023
