Young Carer’s Mental Health Toolkit

Funded by the Scottish Government, this toolkit is put together by the Young Carers Mental Health Development Coordinator in partnership with the Scottish Young Carers Services Alliance and Carers Trust (known as The Princess Royal Trust for Carers in Scotland)

This toolkit came about due to discussions with young carer workers who were looking for ideas and resources they could use to promote positive mental health and wellbeing. The toolkit aims to provide activities which use the notion of building resiliency of young carers.

The ability to deal with the challenges daily life can throw up, respond to stress, and maintain a sense of meaning, hope and identity is called resiliency. Factors long associated with mental health and well being, such as achieving goals, having positive relationships, doing well in school, and feeling hopeful, seem to promote resiliency and so lead to positive mental health.

For many young carers their exposure to the stress of the caring role, family illness/disability or substance misuse, coupled with other risk factors can compromise their ability to remain resilient. For workers it is important that building resilience becomes part and parcel of the work done with young carers.

 There are 4 key areas for promoting resiliency (93 KB)

Using the Toolkit

The toolkit is divided into following sections:

Within each section is  a selection of activities (100 KB) for you to choose from. They are not intended to be worked on in a set order, but you can create  a weekly programme (101 KB)around wellbeing (or looking after yourself) and use certain activities each week.

There are also facilitator notes with some suggestions about topics for discussions, or some tips if participants are not sure what to talk about. The facilitator notes also contain some reading and other resources if workers want to find out more about the topic and are available as downloads at the relevant activities or sections.

There is no right or wrong way to use the toolkit; it has been designed so that you can choose topics you wish to cover. Some of the activities can be used in  one to one sessions with young carers (99 KB).

Other useful bits of information can be downloaded from following links:

 Child Protection (96 KB)
 Confidentiality (119 KB)
 Working with groups (111 KB)