Nicole's story

Nicole is 13 years old. She cares for her father, who is bipolar, and her two younger brothers, one with autism spectrum disorder and learning needs, the other Down’s Syndrome.  

Due to her caring role, Nicole experienced mental health challenges, low self-esteem, worry, tiredness, stress, anxiety, and experiences low mood. She struggles with social situations and has concerns about her body image. She had self-harmed and experiences suicidal thoughts, having once planned suicide. 

We started to address Nicole’s issues through a series of five one-to-one sessions. One of Nicole’s key issues was that she felt she didn’t have a space to express her worries and concerns. The main aim of the sessions was to start to provide that space. The sessions helped Nicole learn about strategies to manage difficult feelings which could lead to self-harm and suicidal thoughts. In this work, we built upon her use of the CalmHarm app. During our sessions, we were able to celebrate with Nicole one hundred days without self-harm. 

Nicole reflected during the sessions that she struggled with all her different priorities (school, family, caring role, self-care, social). She found little time to spend on social and self-care and recognised that having time for herself would help her to feel better about herself and manage her other priorities. She explored what was stopping her and worked on ways to find more time for herself. She started devoting one evening a week to an activity or meeting up with friends and aimed to set aside time for self-care techniques, to which we introduced Nicole. Following our sessions, Nicole agreed that she had, “learnt how to balance her caring role with other things in her life.” Nicole decided she also wanted to be referred to Youth Moves Mentoring giving her someone to talk to for a further 12 weeks and supporting her to work on further changes she wants to make in her life. 

School life has also improved. We worked together to find how school could additionally support her. We advocated for her so that school were more aware of her mental health and put more support in place including the continuation of sessions with a counsellor which were about to end.   As a result of our advocacy, Nicole said, “school is much better for me now and I feel able to speak to Learning Support in a more open way.”Overall, Nicole felt, “school now heard my problems or worries and helped me to solve them.” and that she “was getting the best out of her education.” 

The one-to-one sessions are the start of our relationship and work with Nicole. Importantly, she knows that she can contact us if things get really difficult and she wants someone to talk with. Nicole now feels, “able to speak to support workers about how things are going in my life.”  By the end of our sessions, Nicole felt a sense of achievement and that her most positive outcome was that "caring was at a manageable level.”