Failed by the system, the teens who set up their own mental health charity

People don’t realise that you’re not meant to fear social situations’ (Picture: Getty Images)

At school, Bridie Downing had become accustomed to the shaky hands and nausea before a lesson.

The experience of occasionally struggling to breathe had become completely normal to her, and when she was 14 she had her first panic attack as she was due to go into history. Her friends whisked her away to the corridor and comforted Bridie while she got her bearings.

‘I was used to feeling like that most days, but I didn’t know it was anxiety,’ the now 18-year-old tells Metro.co.uk.

‘It wasn’t until one of my friends asked if it had been a panic attack, that it clicked. The butterflies in my stomach and the shaky hands had become normal, and I didn’t know that it could reach that level. I realised I couldn’t feel like that during my exams, so I decided to get help.’

With around five children in every classroom experiencing mental health problems, it’s an issue that’s on the rise among young people. One in six children (aged five to 16) were identified as having a probable mental health problem in July 2021, a huge increase from one in nine in 2017, according to the charity Young Minds.

Despite the panic attacks, Bridie was functioning well; getting her schoolwork done and seeing friends, so when she approached Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), she was told she wasn’t ill enough for help.

One in six children (aged five to 16) were identified as having a probable mental health problem (Picture: Getty Images)

Fortunately, she was given therapy through school and a counsellor taught her breathing techniques which helped fix the problem.

‘I realised how incredibly lucky I was to get help for it when I knew that there was people around me who were worse off that couldn’t even get an appointment,’ says Bridie.

‘But everyone should have access to these techniques. If other kids could learn to do these things, they might not end up needing to see a therapist. If things like breathing techniques became as basic as brushing your teeth daily, then that could help people before they get to the point where they need help from CAMHS.’

Bridie wanted to use her own experiences to help others, so did a mental health ambassador course at her school. However, a few months later the service was cancelled due to funding cuts.

Then, one day in 2020, she went to a beach near her north Devon home for a walk with friends Conor Warren, Tegan Phillips and Joseph Carter. The four of them discussed the lack of mental health support for young people.

Bridie, Conor and their friends discussed feel let down over lack of mental health support for young people (Picture: Supplied)

‘We felt really let down because at the time funding was cut for mental health and we were going into Covid,’ she remembers. ‘We felt like we hadn’t been taught properly about emotional wellbeing in school and spoke about how crazy it was that mental health is such a big thing.

‘It impacts one in four people, yet we are not taught how to cope with it. We are told where to get help, but people who are struggling often feel like they don’t have it bad enough to do that.’

It was Conor’s idea to set up a mental health charity, raising money and using their own experiences to help people; given that so few other organisations have teens’ input.

So in December they set up Spark UK, a mental health organisation run by young people for young people, with an aim to ‘spark conversations around mental health’ with resources, campaigns and lessons for young people across the country.

It was Conor’s idea set up Spark a charity dedicated to destigmatising discussions around mental illness (Picture: Supplied)

So far 300 schools have since signed up, and Bridie is now studying clinical psychology at Exeter University with a view to becoming a mental health professional herself. She says she is in a good place at the moment, and that more importantly, she has tools to deal with the bad days.

She adds: ‘During my time at school, there was a huge stigma around people with mental health, that it was those that were emo or more alternative who had mental health problems, that they were the ones who self harm, and so that manifested in how teachers treated people with mental health issues.

‘The staff were really good with some people, but others were seen as problems and didn’t get the kindness and the support.’

This is why Spark’s aim is to encourage open conversation among youngsters..

‘People don’t realise that you’re not meant to fear going into lessons and you’re not meant to fear social situations,’ explains Bridie.

Sparks UK go into schools to speak to people their own age about getting support (Picture: Supplied)

‘You are meant to feel comfortable in yourself. If you feel anxious or have panic attacks all the time, then it becomes a disorder. I was feeling it every day to the point where I said to my mum that I don’t want to go to school anymore, even though there was nothing in school that made me feel anxious – it was just at that point life entirely made me anxious.

‘That’s when I knew I needed to get help. Our whole philosophy at Spark is that everyone has mental health as much as physical health and you should be provided support, even if you feel just bad for one day, you should be able to access it.’

16-year-old Noah McNamara joined the charity because he felt not enough was being done to help his peers.

He tells Metro.co.uk: ‘It has affected so many people that I know and it doesn’t feel enough is being done to help children and teens to get through their struggles. NHS waiting lists are a really big problem and that leads to massive consequences when depression and anxiety are left untreated.

‘If you went into any school in the country,  you would be surprised by how many people have suffered some sort of anxiety recently. It’s a problem that’s emerged over the past ten years and that we haven’t really got a grip of yet.

Noah and Bridie are both part of the Sparks team (Picture: Supplied)

‘Social media has got a lot to answer for. It’s not a coincidence that when you look at the emergence of Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram in recent years and how it coincides with a massive increase in depression and anxiety, self harm and suicide. It’s really scary.’

The constant comparison invited by social media creates impossibly high standards that end up ‘degrading teens whose brains are not developed enough to deal with it’, Noah says, adding that young people are still being affected by the after-effects of Covid. These problems, he believes, are being compounded by parents who are unaware of how to help their children, and a lack of government funding.

‘Austerity has really hit services hard. The Government have cut so many youth services which are so incredibly important to communities,’ he explains. ‘This takes away safe spaces from teens that they might not have at home or school. To effectively tackle mental health you need more resources. And parents need to ask questions of their children and listen to the answers.’

Ironically for founder Conor Warren, 17, setting up Spark to help others with their mental health, has meant he’s had to work harder to protect his own.

Conor decided to seek help for his mental health rather than throw in the towel with Spark (picture: Supplied)

He’s been going non-stop after setting up the charity at just 14 – occasionally taking on three part time jobs at one time alongside his college and charity work.

As the organisation’s CEO, Conor knows all too well the impact of poor mental health. He has experienced spells of anxiety at primary school, again when his parents split up, and more recently, when he was burning the candle at both ends building Spark.

‘I’ve only recently started to understand my own mental health,’ he admits. ‘When you’re leading a mental health charity you often don’t think about your own wellbeing and you prioritise everybody else first. So, the anxiety built up over time and over the last few years and then over the summer it all erupted. I was overthinking until I made myself sick. I went through a cycle of feeling worse and worse and I stopped going out and seeing people. So it was quite a difficult time to try and understand what was going on.’

Meanwhile, the charity was going from strength-to-strength, winning a Rotary Young Citizen Award, a Prince of Wales Award and with the team this year being crown Coronation Champions by the Royal Voluntary Service and HRH The Queen Consort.

Despite the charity going from strength-to-strength Conor found himself struggling at times (Picture: Supplied)

Despite these successes, Conor struggled.

He explains: ’People think that because you run a mental health charity, everything’s perfect. But it’s far from it. Also there was the pressure that our organisation’s selling point is that we are very young people. So while we’re doing our exams and everything else that we need to do, there is this underlying anxiety that we have got this sell-by-date. So for a long time I have thought that as soon as we are no longer young people, we will just got down the drain. I felt like I had to keep pushing constantly to come up with bigger and better things.’

Conor’s family were understandably concerned about him, and after considering cutting down on his workload, he spoke to North Devon Voluntary Services. From there, Conor decided to seek help rather than throw in the towel – especially as the charity was doing so well.

‘It is so important to have a charity run by people who know what it’s really like’ (Credits: Getty Images)

He started seeing a counsellor and made improvements to his work/life balance ‘learning to be a teenager, go out on a Friday night, go out weekends and just enjoy myself’, but the episode shows that all too often mental health is misunderstood – even by those in the know.

‘There is still a stigma around mental health. In the younger years of secondary school, it was very much that if you said you have anxiety or depression, people thought you were attention seeking,’ explains Conor.

‘People often don’t understand mental health; they think it is only the bad stuff – the really bad depression and anxiety and actually, it’s far more than that. One of the reasons we set up Spark is because there was this missing aspect of education and people understanding what mental health actually means.

‘Sometimes people think it is just this social media stuff about self care and mindfulness, but it’s much deeper than that. Which is why it is so important to have a charity run by people who know what it’s really like.’

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Around five children in every classroom experience mental health problems.