Young Carers are More Likely to Suffer Mental Illness - This Needs to Change!

19th May 2016

While mental health awareness week is crucial for highlighting the destructive nature of mental illness, one group of people remain largely off the radar when it comes to mental health issues. Young Carers.

These children and young people are hidden from view for most of the time, living their lives in enormously difficult circumstances. They are often the butt of cruel jokes, and of taunting and bullying at school. Home life is often a relentless struggle to keep their loved one safe. Mentally, they’re adults long before their time, with all the worries and problems adulthood brings.

To illustrate the point, if you Google “young carers”, you’ll see a plethora of stories about young carers and bullying, young carers and mental health issues. One story that has haunted me for the past few years was the plight of Chelsea Hollis, a young carer who looked after her mum after she lost her sight.

Chelsea would help with the cooking, washing, cleaning, shopping. She’d fuss over her mum’s safety at home and fret over her when she was at school. For her pains, she was taunted, shunned and bullied at her primary school (yes, primary school!) and admitted: “I feel like I’m not going to have a good future because I haven’t got that many friends and I don’t really get to play that much.”

Chelsea was 10 years old.

Dreadful as it sounds, this is not unusual, it’s often the norm – other children bullying a child for the incapacity of their mum, dad, brother, sister. Most bullying takes the form of jeering about the physical or learning disabilities, or mental health problems, of a young carers’ parents.

Two-thirds of young carers face rejection at school by their peers and feel largely misunderstood by their teachers. According to research, 40% of young carers admitted that teachers at their school were unaware they cared for family members at home. These children often failed to deliver their homework on time and regularly turned up late for classes, leading to spells in detention. It’s estimated that some 13,000 children and young people spend a staggering 50 hours a week looking after someone at home. Unsurprisingly, four in 10 (38%) of young carers in the UK say they have had a mental health problem.

So, after children in care, young carers are possibly the most vulnerable group of children and young people for whom health and social care services have a responsibility. But awareness of their needs and appropriate interventions have remained a complex issue and, as a consequence, young carers are largely hidden within our society.

Statistics compiled from the 2001 UK census estimated that there were at least 175,000 young carers in the UK, with around a third caring for a person with a mental illness. It is likely the actual number was higher then and is higher now. Research has suggested around a third of young carers are involved in inappropriate and excessive caring with a consequent effects on schooling and other key areas of their lives.

Many people are shocked to hear that children as young as five years old have caring responsibilities. But the 2011 Census found that there were nearly 10,000 young carers aged 5-7 in England and Wales. Furthermore, the figures showed an 83% increase since 2001 in the number of 5-7 year olds providing unpaid care (UK Census, 2011). This worrying rise in the number of very young children caring for family and friends, along with the many unidentified young carers, clearly demonstrates the need for the law to protect this vulnerable group of children and young people.

The Children and Families Act 2014 now gives young carers in England a right to an assessment of their own needs, no matter how much caring they do. Local authorities must identify young carers, prevent them from having excessive and inappropriate caring roles and use a whole-family approach to consider how the needs of a young carer or young adult carer are linked to the needs of a person receiving care.

Despite the fact that there are children under 8 who have caring responsibilities, many services for young carers only start working with children once they reach 8 years old. One of the reasons for this is uncertainty around whether a service working with very young carers is required to register with Ofsted.

As a result, many services are not targeting young carers under 8 years old and young carers services in general may not have the expertise, resources or knowledge to work with this age group. As a consequence of dedicated support for this age group, it is also hoped that awareness of younger carers by other services and professionals will also improve, so that children and their families are identified earlier and receive timely support.

Children and young people’s mental health can be affected by their caring role, whether the condition of the person they care is related to physical health, mental health, an addiction or frailty in old age. The emotional wellbeing of children is just as important as their physical health. Good mental health allows them to develop the resilience to cope with whatever life throws at them and they can then grow into well rounded and healthy adults.

Young adults with caring roles report higher rates of anxiety and depression. The GP Patient Survey finds that a third more young adult carers report anxiety or depression than other young people – 39% for young adult carers, in contrast with 28% of young people without caring responsibilities.

In practice, it is more useful to recognise and understand the extent and nature of the caring being provided and the actual or potential impact of these caring responsibilities. Consideration of caring responsibilities should therefore be based on the premise that: “A child or young person becomes vulnerable when the level of care-giving and responsibility to the person in need of care becomes excessive or inappropriate for that child, risking impacting on his or her own emotional or physical well being or educational achievement or life chances.” (Children’s Society – Principals of good practice with Young Carers)

Young carer services offer a range of early intervention and prevention support to young people with caring responsibilities aimed at:
• identifying and supporting young carers early
• reducing inappropriate or excessive caring roles
• improving young carers physical, mental and emotional health
• reducing barriers to accessing and sustaining education, training and employment
• improving young carers’ life chances and helping them reach their potential.

By adopting a whole-family approach professionals can assess and respond to the needs of the whole family by directly supporting families or by actively coordinating the support of other services.