Children and Young People’s Wellbeing Service

What is the service?

Our team of Wellbeing Practitioners use Low-Intensity CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy). CBT is a talking therapy that looks at the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

The Low-Intensity part means that we offer short-term interventions (usually around 6-8 sessions) to support children and young people experiencing mild to moderate mental health difficulties, such as low mood, different types of anxiety, OCD, phobias and behavioural difficulties. In these pieces of work, we aim to equip and empower young people with the skills and techniques to reach their wellbeing goals that they have set.

Who are we?

Hi, I’m Will and I am a Wellbeing Practitioner for Children and Young People at YMCA Exeter. After living in Exeter for just over a year, I am so excited to be part of the team here. I am really fascinated by psychology, people and how our minds work. I enjoy early mornings (and early nights), walks in nature, participating in the life of the church and learning the guitar.

Hi, I’m Alice and I am a Qualified Wellbeing Practitioner for Children and Young People.

I love being by the sea (and swimming in it!), walking my dog in beautiful places and practicing yoga. I also love any plans that involve food – nachos are my favourite!

Hi, I’m Stephanie, a Qualified Wellbeing Practitioner for Children and Young People.

I’m a dog lover with a Bichon Frise back home in Hong Kong! In my free time, I enjoy exploring the Devon countryside. When it is too cold, I will be curled up on the couch with the telly on. I am also a big foodie, with my favourite food being sushi!

Hi, I am Georgia and I am a Wellbeing Practitioner for Children and Young People (In Training).

I have a degree in Marine and Natural History photography, which fuelled my love for the sea! I also absolutely love baking (particularly cinnamon rolls), turtles and spending time with friends and family.

Hi I’m Archie and I am one of the Wellbeing Practitioner for Children and Young People (in training). In my spare time I’m an avid Liverpool supporter (watching every match my wife allows me to) as well as a being a self-proclaimed wings connoisseur.

I love leading worship and do so at my church alongside being a youth leader, but normally I can be found in the sea or anywhere with water.

Dislikes – Coriander

Hi, I’m Vasti and I am the Customer Service and Admin Support for the Children and Young People’s Wellbeing Team. I am the first point of contact for all enquiries and referrals.

I’m originally from South Africa, but absolutely love everything about the UK. In my spare time, I love swimming, walking on the beach, horse riding as well as putting my feet up to watch a movie. Lastly but by no means least, I love spending time with the family and our gorgeous 5 grandchildren!

Hi, I’m Laura and I am a Wellbeing Practitioner for Children and Young People (in training). I have a passion to help young people to root their identity in God, instead of the world, through leading an event called Rooted at my local church. I have been described as a very jolly person who absolutely love dolphins, playing the piano, going on coastal walks and any type of exercise, especially netball and running.

What difficulties can we help with?

The infographic shows the sorts of things you might be experiencing that we can support with. We will also create goals that are driven by you and our sessions will be structured to support you in reaching these goals.

YMCA Exeter mental health resilience children anxiety behaviour

We are passionate that every young person gets the right support for their needs. To help you determine whether a referral to our service is appropriate at this time, please take a read of the information below.

As a service, we offer Low-Intensity CBT. This support encourages a young person to help change the way their thoughts or behaviours are making them feel. Therefore, this support is not appropriate when the main difficulty is outside of their control, such as difficult family dynamics or bullying, which might need more practical support.

Additionally, a young person may not be able to benefit from Low-Intensity CBT if they are experiencing or have recently experienced:

Trauma

Eating disorders

Complex family relationships

Grief/bereavement

Bullying

School avoidance for a significant amount of time

If you need support for the difficulties mentioned above, counselling may be more appropriate at this time. Counselling offers a space to process your feelings and reflect on past experiences.

For concerns related to bullying, we recommend reaching out to your school or college.

What do the sessions look like?

We provide either face-to-face sessions at our offices in central Exeter or remote sessions via Zoom. Between sessions, tasks are set with your CWP to support you in achieving your goals outside of the sessions. We can either work directly with the young person or with the parent.

Attendance Agreement

After you have submitted a referral to us

Once you have submitted a referral to us, it will go through our screening process. If we feel that that we would not be the right support for you at this time, we will send you a letter via email to let you know.

If you do not receive a letter from us, that means that you have been screened as appropriate for an Assessment session with us. This means that a practitioner will be in touch with you when they are available, to arrange an Assessment session with you. This Assessment session is to help us find out a bit more about how things have been feeling for you, and check if we are the right support for you at this time.

If your referral is screened as appropriate for an Assessment with us:

We will attempt to contact you using the contact methods that you provided us on your referral form (please do check your junk mailbox for any email contact from us if you gave us your email address.)
We will try and contact you a maximum of 3 times.
If we do not get a response from you after our 3 contact attempts, we will assume that our support is no longer needed, and will close your case. (If there is any reason why you might not be contactable at some point, e.g. if you have a holiday booked, please do let us know on your referral form so that we are aware.)

During support

Our Low-Intensity CBT support works best when we have consistent sessions. Therefore, if you do not attend 2 scheduled sessions in a row, it might be that it is not the right time for support for you, and we will look to close your case (unless there are exceptional circumstances- to be discussed with your therapist.)
If you do not show up to your session (face-to-face or via Zoom) within 15 minutes of the session’s start time, this is classed as a missed appointment.
To help our team use their time and capacity as best as possible, we ask that if you need to cancel/rearrange your appointment, you get in touch with your therapist at least 48 hours before your session in due to start. However, we recognise that sometimes this might not be possible (e.g. illness), so we ask that you let your therapist know as soon as possible.

Thank you for your understanding and for helping us to offer the best support that we can to the young people we work with 😊

Please note: Due to an unprecedented high number of referrals, our service is currently closed to new referrals.

In the meantime, please do look into the following: