Our vision is for no young person to feel alone with their mental health – and through our digital support, we can achieve exactly that.
No matter what's going on for young people, no matter what pressure they're facing, YoungMinds is here to make sure they are never alone with their feelings. Through safe and trusted mental health information and advice, which continually evolves to respond to societal issues and young people's needs, we can make sure they have the support to help them navigate what they're going through.
This year was a landmark year for our Never Alone programme as we launched our new website with a particular focus on getting better support to young people more quickly and effectively.
Our social media channels, blogs and the Shout Textline also proved to be vital and trusted resources during a challenging year for young people’s mental health.
Every young person who needs us can find us quickly and easily.
Every young person we engage with feels more hopeful about their mental health and can do something positive to improve their situation.
Every young person who wants to be a source of support to their friends can come to us to gain the skills and confidence to do so.
Our Instagram community is an incredible space where we are able to raise the voices of young people to share messages of advice and support, and where young people come together to support each other too.
Last year, we saw an incredible growth of 29% from 121,846 followers to 157,646, achieving engagements of 1,127,433.
When a young person feels alone with what they're going through, knowing that others have been through what they have, and come out of the other side to share their experiences, can make all the difference. For that reason, the YoungMinds blog is such an inspiring place where young people can feel more hopeful, and can receive invaluable peer-to-peer advice, support and reassurance.
Last year we saw record traffic to our relaunched blog, including:
Run with our partners at Mental Health Innovations, the Shout Textline service is there for any young person in the UK to access free support, at any time of day or night, via text message.
After extensive research, we were able to design a brand-new site where young people could use innovative new tools to help them to find the help they needed more quickly.
Our Help Finder tool asks questions to help ground a young person who might be confused about what’s happening for them and what help they need. It guides young people through how they might be feeling to then find the most helpful information and advice.
Our Help Finder has been accessed 283,814 times since its launch.
We launched our Bayo campaign to help make the mental health conversation more relevant and accessible to Black young people and to link them up with the incredible community groups already doing great work for Black young people and their mental health.
This campaign ran alongside The Ubele Initiative, Mind and Best Beginnings, and was funded by the National Emergencies Trust.
Our Britain Get Talking campaign continued to support huge numbers of people to start conversations about their mental health and become better active listeners.
Over 100 celebrities broadcasted messages of support at critical moments when the pandemic was hitting hard on loneliness. This included Ant and Dec speaking to 7.5 million viewers on Saturday Night Takeaway.