Is headspace making a difference to young people’s lives?

3. Access and Engagement with Centres
et al., 2009) and remained so in this evaluation. This suggests that headspace needs to change its
engagement and/or treatment practices to better meet the needs of this group. This type of change
requires greater understanding of the barriers and facilitators of service access for CALD young
people, including the locations of centres relative to areas of higher CALD density, as well as the
key issues that affect them. Interviews with headspace staff indicate that this is not a priority area
(only 3 of 25 staff members interviewed spoke about CALD young people). Two interviewed workers
expressed concern that they were not seeing many young refugees despite being located in an
area where this would have been expected. They did, however, not know how to respond to this
circumstance:
Every now and then we get some clients with some level of language barrier and that have
migrated here and are on their own and that sort of thing. Often in that case we do refer to a
trans-cultural clinical service because there is that barrier and… we don’t have any
interpreters.
We don’t get very many of the African communities and we’ve got a lot of African people
living locally.
Another staff member questioned why CALD young people were not attending headspace:
I haven’t had any referrals from non-English speaking backgrounds. Not really any referrals
for young people from the various ethnic groups in the area. There’s a lot of Turkish families
and there’s African families here now and they’re certainly not any of the young people that I
have had referred to me over the time that I’ve been here. So I’m not sure what’s happening
there.
Although the vulnerability and under-representation of this group was acknowledged by some
headspace staff, the majority did not comment on this issue, perhaps suggesting that staff do not
know how to respond. Only one staff member suggested community engagement as a strategy for
addressing the under-representation of CALD young people as headspace clients.
Personal barriers
Interviewees identified the mental and cognitive functioning of clients as a barrier to access and
sustained engagement with headspace services. A number of young people talked about their
reluctance to attend a centre because they were too scared to talk face-to-face to a counsellor.
Given that many of the young people who attend the service are dealing with crippling anxiety
issues, making initial contact was often described as a huge challenge.
The problem is themselves. It’s the going out and seeking help and wanting to get better. The
problem is more to do with that than problems with the actual centre. (Male, 18 years)
3.4 How do parents/carers facilitate or hinder young people’s access to and
engagement with headspace services?
Research has demonstrated that parents can play an important role in facilitating young people’s
access to mental health services and help-seeking behaviours (Wahlin & Deane, 2012). As
discussed above, 40% of young people reported that they mostly attended headspace because of
the influence of family or friends. This was further reinforced in the headspace Parents and Carers
Study.
Interviews with young people and parents/carers indicate that some young people were encouraged
to attend headspace because of the actions of their parents. Six of the 50 young people interviewed
(all were female and ranged in age from 13 to 24) described how their mother had made their first
appointment with headspace:
Mum found [headspace] online and then a few weeks after she made an appointment and
I don’t know, I just started going from there… I didn’t even want to go in the first place
because I thought that I was okay and there was nothing wrong with me and that mum was
just over-reacting to me being upset (Female, 15 years)
The Parents and Carers Survey data indicates, however, that while parents employed many
Social Policy Research Centre 2015
headspace Evaluation Final Report
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