by Web Master
Laura Black — January 25, 2024
The journey from adolescence to adulthood has always been complex. Its a time of growing independence, mad hormonal and body changes and the expression of sexuality, huge way-finding, considerable risk-taking, and burdened by the demand to make “rest of your life” choices.
Today’s young people, however, are less likely than their parents to have had unmonitored independent time with peers, less likely to have spent recreational time outdoors, and much more likely to have been exposed to the considerable risks of unregulated social media. All of which are known to negatively impact the development of good mental health.
It is also a time for those who will experience them, when the first signs of major mood, anxiety, personality, trauma, eating, substance abuse, and psychotic disorders make their first appearances; sometimes in combination – young people will sometimes use of substances and alcohol to self-soothe the anxiety, low mood, and general jitters that they’re already experiencing.
Methodist Mission Southern’s three Youth Transition Houses (one of which is for Young Mums) provide accommodation and support for up to 17 rakatahi (young people) and in the case of Young Mums, up to 6 pēpi (babies) at any one time. For the 14 rakatahi without bubs, our expectation is that they will be in education while they stay with us – we are happy to help arrange that! – with our experience being that over a third are still in school when they move in.
Some arrive with mental health professionals already engaged. More arrive with undiagnosed mental health problems that they are at least partly aware of.
This is not surprising: homelessness is often an expression of a bunch of things going wrong. Poor mental health – outside of organic mental health disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder – frequently has a functional cause: something(s) significant has gone wrong. With the early stages of organic mental health disorders including behaviours that families find intolerable; it is likely that poor mental health can both contribute and be a response to the causes of youth homelessness.
Unfortunately, the early signs can be confused with just being a bit different, and there are good social reasons for young people to deny or pass off any sense they have of poor mental health.
And, for reasons surpassing belief, getting good professional support to rakatahi in a timely way when the wheels are starting to wobble, relies far too much on luck. Are the adults in your life attentive, available, and able? Are you lucky enough to live in a community that has support services with spaces available when you need them? Are those services visible to you? And are those resources skilled in your culture, focussed on your needs, willing to treat you as a whole person, and skilled at the work? Failing all of that, do you, by accident of birth, have access to the financial resources that may be needed to get good help?
Because without that, the risk for rakatahi is that their issue will snowball until services like our Youth Transition Houses are needed.
Laura Black
Kaihautū Director
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