Milestone figure unlocked for leading children’s mental health charity
Kibble marked Children’s Mental Health Week with a key milestone for specialist service for young people who have experienced abuse.
The UK-based charity Kibble, which supports at-risk children aged between five and 26, have just announced that more than 1,500 children have been helped from a unique trauma-informed service that has been designed by young people to meet their mental health needs.
Founded in 1841 to honour Miss Elizabeth Kibble, who helped set up care homes for kids, the charity has set up specialists intervention services (SIS) which is the first to use a range of therapies including play and art therapy to help children express their emotions after they have experienced an abusive background.
As a result of such a different and catered approach, the charity have recorded that the trauma-informed therapy has helped around 75 children and young people per year.
Now, in line with the theme for Children’s Mental Health Week: my voice matters, the SIS team are working with young people at Kibble to review how the service can continue to grow and expand to offer therapeutic support for more young people with the potential to open the service to those outside of the organisation.
Claire McCartney, Kibble’s operations manager who joined the organisation in 2003 and led the development of SIS said: ‘It’s incredible to think that more than 20 years have passed since I started at Kibble and developed the specialist intervention services.
‘The service has changed so much but that’s testament to our constant commitment to achieving our central objective, which has always remained the same – to help children recover from trauma and live as fulfilling a life as possible.
‘When you consider that most children in our care have experienced complex trauma through emotional neglect or physical abuse – sometimes at the hands of their carers – qualifying ‘success’ can be nuanced.
‘If you don’t have that safety and security early on, how you see the world is greatly impacted further down the line and putting words to emotions is very difficult.
‘At SIS, something as simple as seeing a child smile for the first time after weeks of therapy can be a massive breakthrough, and it’s our job to understand that and give them a new experience of relationships that can be healthy and safe.’
According to the most recent statistics from the NSPCC, half a million children a year suffer abuse in the UK. During 2021/22 the NSPCC’s helpline contacted agencies about 22,505 children to investigate concerns about abuse and neglect.
Despite Kibble doing such a good job with helping children who have been exposed to/experienced abuse first-hand, these figures show more work needs to be done.
Jim Gillespie, Kibble CEO, said: ‘Helping 1,500 children through this specialised service is an achievement we are proud of and at Kibble we are always continuing to expand and adapt our service provision to meet the growing demand of support children and young people in our sector need. Reaching this milestone within SIS serves as a reflection to the young people we have been able to support and acts as a marker for the continued growth and evolution of this vital service.’
Image: Kibble
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