A period in residential work, followed by a decade developing services for young care-leavers in Lothian, led to Little being taken on by the mental health charity Penumbra 10 years ago to develop services for young people.
The charity's decision to branch into specialist youth services was made against the backdrop of what Little terms an "explosion" of referrals of young people to psychiatric care.
He attributes this to the combination of industrial decline, confusing changes to gender roles in society and the break up of the extended family he has observed in his adopted country. The statistics appear to confirm that specialist intervention is needed for young people.
Suicide accounts for 80 per cent of all young deaths in Scotland and the number of young women taking their own lives has increased by 250 per cent over the past 25 years. Penumbra estimates that about one in 10 under-19s in Scotland have mental health problems.
Self-harm is more difficult to measure, as hospital admissions only reflect a small percentage of actual incidents, but it was quickly identified by Little's team as one of the biggest issues it had to deal with. This realisation led the charity to launch the biggest range of projects yet to address self-harm in Scotland.
The team has heard many anecdotes from young self-harmers about mistreatment by hospital staff, including health professionals accusing young people of wasting their time. But Penumbra's awareness-raising efforts are helping to improve understanding.
"People who self-harm have problems in their lives that cause them to hurt themselves," says Little. "If they're helped to think through the underlying issues, then their need for self-harm reduces."
It is this way of thinking that has steered the charity's approach to youth mental health over the past 10 years.
The first thing Little's team did when Penumbra's youth services began was to set up a drop-in service for young people, which taught it that young people had huge insights into the experiences they were going through.
"Part of their difficulty was that they didn't tell people what was happening in their lives," says Little.
He continues: "As their whole lives were in turmoil, the only control they had was to hold on to their own information, and many of them ended up misdiagnosed and misunderstood. We often didn't know where their difficulties began, because what maybe began as a problem about a relationship difficulty or bereavement could have developed into a drug or alcohol problem."
But most did remember when things started going wrong, something that pointed Penumbra towards working with people earlier in life.
Early intervention, raising awareness of mental health among youth professionals and giving young people the ability to help shape the services they use underpin much of the initiatives Penumbra has developed over the past decade.
This year the charity is celebrating the 10th anniversary of its work with young people. To mark the occasion, it is producing a guide for the Scottish Executive on involving young people in shaping mental health services.
So while the causes of young people's mental health problems seem unlikely to go away, Little does have the chance to play a significant role in helping Scottish services become better placed to deal with the fallout.
FYI
- Penumbra's services include the Borders Youth Project, which provides drop-in services, help in getting work or training, and supported living for 16- to 21-year-olds
- Penumbra runs self-harm projects in Aberdeen, North Ayrshire and West Lothian. These are all funded by the Scottish Executive's Choose Life initiative
- A self-harm project for 16- to 25-year-olds will start in Edinburgh next week and will be followed by an early intervention service for over-18s in Fife
www.penumbra.org.uk
