“New Report Shows Benefits of Innovative Youth Mental Health Support Service: Listen Project Helps 92% of Research Participants to Develop Coping Skills to Deal With Problems”

An evaluation of the Listen Project, an innovative youth mental health support service for 12 – 21 year olds in north east Dublin, has shown the benefits of offering a community based service for young people to talk through and explore problems with a qualified counsellor in a ‘Listen Session’. The evaluation report, compiled by Quality Matters and launched today, has shown that the Listen Project helped 83 percent of research participants to develop a better understanding of what was going on for them and helped 92 percent of these young people to develop new cognitive or behavioural coping skills to help them deal with their problems and manage stress.

The Listen Project was established in 2012 to provide young people in Dublin 17, 13, 5 and surrounding areas with meaningful support that would be available within their own community and that would reduce the stigma for young people with regard to accessing counselling support. The project offered young people ‘Listen Sessions’ with qualified counsellors with the aim of ensuring that they felt heard on issues they were concerned about. The project operated a model of time-limited counselling, meaning that young people could access up to a maximum of eight sessions after which point the counselling relationship would be ended and the young person referred on to other services if required.

Speaking at the launch event, Mick Ferron, Manager of Sphere 17 Regional Youth Service, who coordinated the project on behalf of an interagency steering group that also included Northside Partnership, Target Counselling and the New Life Centre, stated that, “We know from existing mental health research, such as Headstrong’s My World Survey, that suicidal thoughts, rates of self-harm and suicide attempts are higher in young adults who do not seek help or talk about their problems. Mental health research also tells us that by intervening early and offering vulnerable young people a service to help them to ‘get things off their chest’ that we can reduce the likelihood of these young people developing lifelong mental health problems.

“By offering this easily accessible service in the community and by addressing the stigma attached to counselling through using the term ‘Listen Sessions’ we were able to encourage young people to avail of this service and to achieve a high attendance rate of 80 percent for scheduled sessions. 42 percent of participants in the research told us that if it had been called a ‘counselling service’ rather than a listening service that it would have negatively impacted on their decision to come.”

Speaking at the event, Aoife Dermody from the Quality Matters research team highlighted some of the main findings which emerged from qualitative interviews with a selection of service users:

“Amongst our key findings, we found that:
• 92% of participants reported that they had experienced positive changes in their lives and / or developed new cognitive or behavioural coping skills as a result of engaging with the Listen Project.
• 83% of the young people said that the counsellor helped them to develop a better understanding of what was going on for them.
• For those who felt a sense of stigma about accessing mental health services before beginning with Listen, the majority reported that this had changed since attending the Listen Project.

“In a cost analysis we also found that the cost to the project to provide a Listen Session at €58 contrasted favourably against the cost of commercial counselling at an average market rate of €65 – 70 per session,” Ms Dermody continued.

“The accessibility of the service was also identified as a key benefit in the research report. Young people were able to self-refer to the programme and did not have to provide a reason for engaging with a counsellor in the Listen Project prior to their first session. As there were no waiting lists for the project, it was also a useful interim support for young people who would otherwise have had to wait between three and six months to access other specialist services such as the HSE’s Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service Teams (CAMHS),” Ms Dermody concluded.

Also speaking at the launch event, Emer Kirwan, one of the Listen Project counsellors who represented Target Counselling on the interagency steering group, stated that, “This report has clearly recommended that the Listen Project service should be continued. It has been shown to be highly valued by the young people who access it as well as effective in supporting them to develop improved coping skills. It is crucial that we continue to offer this opportunity for young people to ‘get things off their chest’ through a service like this which can reduce feelings of distress that they may be experiencing. We need to make sure that we are offering appropriate services that get to young people who may not otherwise discuss their problems.”

» Download our Evaluation report