0191 417 8043
I NEED URGENT HELP

Washington Mind Young People’s Project offer 1-1 counselling and groupwork for young people aged 11+ who live within the City of Sunderland.

Washington Mind’s Young Peoples service

Counselling for Young People

We offer counselling support to young people across a range of welcoming and accessible venues, including The Life House, PopRecs, schools, and other local spaces where young people feel comfortable.

If you’d like to refer a young person for counselling, you can get in touch with our team by calling n 0191 417 8043, or by emailing info@washingtonmind.org.uk.

We’re also happy to have an initial conversation with parents, carers, or professionals who are concerned about a young person, to help figure out whether our service is the right fit – and if not, we’ll do our best to point you in the direction of the support that is.

What to expect

At the first appointment, we take time to get to know the young person and make sure that counselling is the right kind of support for them. A parent or carer is welcome to attend this first session, and we’ll always check in about this when you arrive. Together, we’ll agree on next steps and arrange any further support needed.

Confidentiality

Everything discussed in counselling is confidential. The only exception is if we become concerned that a young person or someone else may be at risk of harm – in which case we may need to share information to keep people safe. If this situation ever arose, we would always speak to the young person first, explain our reasons, and let them know what would happen next.

What is counselling? Our FAQ's page has everything you need to know.
Sometimes while you are waiting for counselling it can be helpful to access other services that offer support:

Childline

is here to help anyone under 19 in the UK with any issue they’re going through. You can talk about anything.

Childline is free, confidential and available any time, day or night.

Visit Childline

Shout

is a free, confidential text service where you can access support 24/7.

To start a conversation, text the word ‘Shout’ to 85258.

Visit Shout

YoungMinds

is the UK’s leading charity fighting for children and young people’s mental health. They make sure all young people get the best possible mental health.

Connect
Our service continues to adapt, and is influenced primarily by the opinions and needs of young people. All of our best ideas come from them, such as; our Mental Health Zine Library, our app Reasons2, the Young People’s area of our online directory (youngpeopleswellbeing.org) and our Sunderland Teenage Market.

The service we offer continues to evolve, and we use a participatory approach to engage with young people as advisors. This enables us to develop new ways of engaging with our community to reduce the stigma around mental health and enable people to access support at the most appropriate time.

Sunderland Teenage Market

Our Sunderland Teenage Market is a celebration of young local talent where we usually have live music and young entrepreneurs running their own market stalls. Open to all, come along and browse what our young traders have been making and have available for sale! We do recommend cash payments for these market days.

To find out more about the market, visit: Sunderland Teenage Market Instagram

How do I hold a stall at an upcoming market?

If you’re 13-24 and want to hold a free stall at one of our upcoming markets, the process is all online and is very informal! Check out our photo guide for the steps to sign up and click here to get started.

The Bunker

We are work in partnership with The Bunker in Sunderland and can sometimes offer free music lessons to young people aged 11+, supported by a young person’s counsellor.

Interested? Send us an email to: info@washingtonmind.org.uk.

Our Projects

Alongside our counselling service and our Sunderland Teenage Market and Free Music Lesson projects, we also offer additional wellbeing and creativity focused projects.

Wellbeinginfo for young people
We have a dedicated Young People’s section of of wellbeinginfo.org where you can find out about different topics such as mental health, self-harm and wellbeing. Click here to visit now.
Mental Health Zine Library (MHZL)
The Mental Health Zine Library is a mobile pop up library and archive, developed with young people, exclusively for DIY publishing on the theme of mental health and all that includes.

Based at Washington Mind, The Life House, the collection stands as a pop up feature a mobile stall at events, art spaces, schools and workshops. It contains zines and publications from creators across the country who have shared their work with us. This includes our own strange things? Collective zines, a project which worked with young people at workshops to use creativity as a self care tool, and accepted online submissions of work from young people who were unable to visit us in person. The work created by the young people at these sessions was then collated into our collections of work including; Closure, Loneliness and Progress (which you can now flick through on issuu here).

There is a catalogue of the publications on our Washington Mind website where you can also find info on events, cool additions to the library, features and information on how to submit your own zines to the collection.

Click here to visit our Mental Health Zine Library page to check out what zines are in the library.

We’d love to hear from you.

Whether you would like to talk to somebody about counselling, or any of our young people’s services, or if you’d like to discuss having our counselling services in your school, college or organisation, please email us at: info@washingtonmind.org.uk or phone on: 0191 417 8043