My name is Lissy Pattison, and I have had a passion for understanding mental health since I was at school. I began training to be a mental health nurse at the age of 19. In my final year of study, I began to specialise in children and adolescents’ mental health. I developed a practice improvement plan for using Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction to help teenagers with mental health problems, and took a job in an adolescent inpatient unit. 

After several years working in acute inpatients as a senior staff nurse, witnessing a wide array of difficult stories, I decided to make a move into prevention and early intervention. I took a job in a secondary school, offering 1:1 Mindfulness and Dialectical Behaviour Therapy based sessions to children that needed support, and assisting in an alternate provision. 

My experiences have enabled me to see the fuller picture. The school environment, the home, and social factors all impact a child’s ability to cope.  School attendance teams and desperate parents and children, are struggling against each other as they work towards getting ‘school-refusers’ back into lessons. I decided to use the term ‘non-attendance’ as an alternative, more accurate term. 

A common theme in the children facing mental health challenges, and non-attendance, is neurodiversity. Specialist support is severely lacking, and classrooms are all too often set up in a way which doesn’t work for these children. Many children, especially girls, are not getting diagnosed until late in their teens, leaving them with even fewer accommodations. 

This experience has fueled me to create a new local service to make a real difference in young people’s lives. We need to teach people the self-soothing and mindfulness skills that can help them in difficult times. But to make a lasting impact, schools need to be inclusive and accommodating of differences regardless of whether there are diagnosed children in the classroom. We need to shift the mindset of non-attendance so that mental health is validated and recognised in the same way that physical health is. We need to help families to communicate healthily with each other, and learn how to support each other. 

These changes will take time; they require families, carers, school leaders, teachers, children, to be open to examining how they work and take on board new ideas. That’s what the Thriving Minds Project aims to achieve.