To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, we’ve decided to highlight why many of the people we see have problems with their mental health.
What causes mental health problems?
Every day, we help people who have experienced many difficulties in life. They need extra help to manage their mental health. In fact, about 75% of the people we see have mental health problems as a result of:
- Childhood abuse, trauma, or neglect
- Social isolation or loneliness
- Discrimination and stigma, including racism
- Social disadvantage, poverty and debt
- Financial strain with the cost-of-living crisis and the rise in inflation
- Bereavement
- Severe or long-term stress
- Having a long-term physical health condition
Sometimes people have used alcohol or drugs to cope. For anyone facing these difficulties, tasks like form-filling, going online, and attending PIP meetings and mental health and probation meetings can be a real challenge.
How we help
The CASS+ team comes alongside to ensure anyone gets exactly the right support and engages positively with mental health services.
Thanks to Devon Community Foundation, the CASS+ team in Newton Abbot can now go the extra mile for people with mental health needs.
Unlike our other sites, the Newton Abbot team can accompany them in court when their cases have gone from the Small Claims, Family and Magistrates’ Courts to Crown Court. We use our networks and knowledge of the criminal justice sector to find solutions to these complicated issues.
As so many of our clients face financial difficulties, we can now make a real difference by visiting them in their own homes, finding out about their needs and delivering vital household items through ACTS 435 and Facebook Marketplace.
Recent feedback from a local NHS psychiatrist
We’ve been working with a young man released from prison who needed support with his mental health. This is the feedback from the psychiatrist involved in his care:
The work you have been involved in with Ed* is an inspiring example of the importance and benefit of supportive relationships with people leaving a custodial setting. In Ed’s case you appear to have been instrumental in supporting him to access stable accommodation, voluntary work, establish and maintain positive and supportive relationships and engage as best he can with mainstream mental health services. The work of the Community Advice and Support Services appears a critical component in the rehabilitation and recovery of people returning to the community following a custodial sentence.
Without this input I very much suspect that highly negative outcomes for people in these circumstances would be more likely to occur with them remaining disengaged from services, marginalised from their communities and at higher risk of further harm to themselves and those around them, and eventually a return to a custodial setting.
I am sorry your period of engagement with Ed has come to an end, but incredibly grateful and impressed with the value attached to the central importance of the working/therapeutic relationship you have established with this complex and vulnerable man, and in response to this, your offer of further engagement should the need arise.
Please get in touch if you live in the Newton Abbot area and need this kind of help.
*Name changed to protect identity
We work hard to break the cycle of re-offending
We provide practical solutions and emotional support so that people can change their lives.
If you would like to help more people improve their mental health, please
