elephants

I attended the launch of an excellent report on young people's mental health. It is stark. 45,000 young people in this place I call home have a mental health problem. About 1 in 5 of all young people indicated that they had suffered from poor mental health before they reached 18. We know that mental ill health has links to poverty, deprivation, sexual orientation and the legacy of our recent conflict . We know that here we have the highest suicide rates in the UK and that those statistics treble in derived areas!
All this we know, yet the subject remains the elephant in the room. We need to talk about it, face it, and assist those fragile young people so no more suffer in the same way. We owe this to them.