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

4. Outcomes of headspace Clients
Social inclusion
Social relationships, or social inclusion, are recognised as having a number of factors that benefit
psychological health. While social support is recognised as providing companionship, it can also
provide emotional sustenance and act as a buffer to stress by assisting with coping mechanisms.
These factors can combine to act as protective factors against psychological distress (Thoits, 2011).
Changes in the degree to which young people felt they were socially supported were compared over
time. The ‘headspace treatment’ group had lower proportions of young people who reported feeling
that people were there for them either all or most of the time when compared with the matched
‘no treatment’ group at Wave 1 (42% compared to 54% of young people felt supported). These
differences are highly statistically significant and illustrate the differences that remain between the
two groups after propensity score matching.
Both the ‘headspace treatment’ group and the matched ‘no treatment’ group reported an increase
in feelings of inclusion between Waves 1 and 2 (5.5 and 6.2 percentage points respectively). These
changes were not significant for the ‘headspace treatment’ group but were significant at the 5% level
for the matched ‘no treatment’ group. No significant differences were observed between the two
groups.
The impact of physical health problems on psychological distress
The matched groups were used to compare the proportion of young people who felt that physical
health problems were a cause of psychological distress. The ‘headspace treatment’ group
experienced a slight decline in the proportion of young people citing physical health being a cause of
psychological distress, and the matched ‘no treatment’ group a slight increase, although neither result
is statistically reliable. No significant differences exist between the two groups at Wave 1, and no
significant differences between the groups can be observed over time.
Drug and alcohol use
Analysis was undertaken to assess two outcomes related to drug and alcohol use: binge drinking and
cannabis use. For young people within the ‘headspace treatment’ group, the average number of days
binge drinking in the last 30 days changed from 1.5 to 1.7 between the two survey waves; however,
this result was not significant at the 1% or 5% level. The matched group that received ‘no treatment’
experienced a decrease in binge drinking, from 1.5 to just under 1 day on average each month.
This decrease is statistically significant (p