In Conversation with Kooth
This week on the Comics Youth x Where are the Girlbands podcast Ella is joined by the lovely Mollie from Kooth. Kooth is an online mental wellbeing community which offers support in a free, safe, and anonymous way through a range of services from discussion boards to live chats to daily journaling and articles written from lived experience perspectives. This episode introduces the platform and speaks about the importance of having safe, accessible wellbeing support for young people.
Hello and welcome to the Comics Youth x Where are the Girlbands Safe Spaces podcast, a space for discussions with organisations and individuals who are creating safe spaces within the North West, with a focus on Merseyside.
The Oxford dictionary definition of a safe space is “a place or environment in which a person or category of people can feel confident that they will not be exposed to discrimination, criticism, harassment or any other emotional or physical harm.” - for many marginalised people spaces such as these are few and far between. It is no surprise when living in such an unsafe society as this one, that marginalised people are at risk of mental ill health and low mood, and it is even more important that when marginalised people do address their mental health concerns, that they can do it in a space that doesn’t carry the same prejudices, fears and triggers of the outside world.
Due to this, we are always on the search for safe mental health spaces that we can refer our audience to. Unfortunately, within Liverpool there is a crisis of underfunding for mental health services with people waiting for months to years on waiting lists and finding their concerns to be swept under the rug by underfunded and struggling services once they finally do get into an appointment. Due to this many people are unable to rely on the NHS for support, and even when they do can find it a stressful experience, meaning that many people are turning to alternative wellbeing spaces for support.
Kooth, the fantastic organisation who we will be chatting to today, are one of those wellbeing spaces. Kooth is an online mental wellbeing community which offers support in a free, safe and anonymous way through a range of services from discussion boards to live chats to daily journaling and articles written from lived experience perspectives. I am here today with the lovely Mollie from Kooth.
Interview with Kooth:
Ella:
Hiya! How are you doing today?
Mollie:
I’m really good thank you? How are you!
Ella:
I’m great! I’m really excited to chat to you actually, I find Kooth and the services that you provide really interesting so I’m really excited to hear more about it from you today!
I’ve already given a bit of a small introduction to Kooth, but it would be lovely to hear from your perspective what Kooth is and why it’s such an important resource.
Mollie:
So Kooth, I used to actually use when I was in school - I’m making that seem like I’m super old - but when I was in school Kooth came in and did presentations and sessions with us and I used that service when I was in school, and I think it’s a really important service for our young people because it gives that anonymity. It means that people who, you know, maybe are worried about speaking up about their mental health or maybe even feel ashamed, which is really sad to say, but there are people who are ashamed about speaking up about their mental health and Kooth gives them that opportunity to speak up but anonymously behind that protection of a username so they can get that support that they so desperately need without feeling insecure about it, so I think it’s really important.
Ella:
Yeah definitely! One of the questions I’d had written was around that anonymity of the service, and I know from my perspective growing up there is often a lot of shame or even fear I think about speaking up about your mental health and, you know, even just like going to a GP is such a daunting thing to have to sit in a room with someone and, you know, talk about you know your life and all the things going on. It’s amazing to hear from a service user’s perspective as well as someone who’s representing Kooth. I’d love to talk a bit more about that anonymity element and why you think it’s so successful at providing, you know, a destigmatised space for people.
Mollie:
I think for me when I go and do you know sessions (so I’m an engagement lead for the company so my role is to go and do things like this) to promote our service and to let young people know that there is a service out there who will help them regardless, and the anonymity element I always describe as being like a keyboard warrior but in a good way. So a keyboard warrior hides behind a fake profile, a fake name, picture, whatever it may be, and will write nasty or derogatory comments that they would never say to someone’s face, and Kooth is like that on the reverse. So if you are nervous or embarrassed or, as we’ve spoken about, sadly ashamed to speak about your mental health but you know that you need that support, having that anonymity to be able to type whatever it is that you’d like to say, to research on the site whatever you need to find help with. I think that’s really, a really important thing and it’s a really important asset to Kooth is that anonymity of the service.
Ella:
Something that really stands out to me about that compared to other wellbeing services online is how within the sort of anonymous way there’s also a real sense of community, and I think you know from my experience and my families experiences of trying to navigate, sort of underfunded NHS mental health services, it can feel like a very lonely and isolating experience sometimes to try and navigate those spaces. Does Kooth aim to address maybe like the loneliness that can sometimes come with trying to find mental health and wellbeing support?
Mollie:
Absolutely, and I see this all of the time when you log into the site. You know Kooth can be as serious or as fun as you want to make it, and you know, searching for mental health support can be extremely isolating, especially if, you know, maybe you don’t have family support or support from friends around you. It can feel very, very lonely. I mean I’m 24 and sometimes I’ll still ring my Mum to make me a doctor’s appointment. So being a young person and the daunting thought of having to go and sit on your own in a GP office or a councillors room, whatever it may be, can be a very, very scary thought, and I think giving young people an opportunity to access support online is a really good way of using a service.
We’re not an app we’re a website, and I think that’s another really important thing, is that if we do have young people who have an app on their phone, their parents may see it and they might not want their parents to see it. They’re able to access that support anonymously from other people using the site as well as other people in their life.
So as I was saying about Kooth being as serious or as fun as you want it to be, we have a lot of young users at the moment who will go on and use our forums for example just to discuss their favourite band. You know K-Pop is such a huge thing at the moment and we see a lot of young people saying, you know, BTS is the best K-Pop band and this is their best song, and other young people will be like no THIS is their best song! And it’s almost just like finding friendship amongst other young people as well as mental health support. So as I said, as serious or as fun as they’d like to make it.
Ella:
That’s so lovely and that’s another thing which really stood out to me compared to other sort of online wellbeing support is that ability to access other people’s lived experience. As you said whether that’s serious or just like fun, and like finding people you relate to and so much of wellbeing is community isn’t it? And it’s like a sense of being found and seen and heard by other people and I feel like Kooth really does that in an amazing way.
And another thing which I think is fantastic is, like you were saying, the different ways you can access the services. You know we’re talking about how sometimes it can be incredibly scary going into doctor’s offices and things like that by yourself, and I feel like Kooth really meets people where they’re at in terms of their comfortability levels. And something I thought was great is the article section on the website and how a lot of those resources are written by young people and people with lived experiences and you know ourselves at Comics Youth, the main ethos of our company is that we’re young-people-led and lived-experience-led, and we’re really passionate about working with young people in that way where they know we’re coming from a standpoint of empathy and share experience and understanding. You know and that creates a lot of safety I think as opposed to going to a GP who is maybe a lot older than you, you don’t know much about them, it’s a really formal experience. So it would be great to hear from you about the youth-led and the lived-experience elements of the community.
Mollie:
So Kooth does offer a counselling service but we are more than just that. So we do have councillors on our site who you can liaise with should you feel that’s necessary for you. But not everyone who suffers with mental health will need to speak to a councillor, and I think that’s a really important distinction is just because you’re suffering with mental health does not mean that you’re going to need to go and sit for hours in a councillors office.
We do have a lot of self-help resources on the website, so you’ve mentioned the articles there. So it’s the Kooth magazine, and there’s over a 100,000 articles on there now, and 75% of them are written by the young people who use the site. Poetry, lived-experiences as you mentioned, tips and tricks. You know we’ll have some of our older young people who will write about revision tips and exam stress and how they dealt with that so our younger users can see from someone who has already been through that already that they’re not on their own, that someone else has got through it and now they’re doing incredibly well for themselves. So there’s that element with the self-help.
There’s also the forums which I’ve mentioned which are a lot like reddit when you look at them. You post an idea or a question with a description and other young people can post replies and comments so you can give support to other people or receive support from them.
And then we also have our mini activities which are sort of like step by step guides is the best way I can describe them on how achieve an activity. So one of our most popular is improve your bedtime routine. If you stay up to 3 o’clock in the morning like I do, it’s a step by step guide on how to improve your sleep routine and establish a healthy sleep routine. So all of these activities, forums, articles are all youth-led and experience-led by our young people who use the site.
One thing I will say mention is that users can’t private message each other through the site. If they are going to liaise with each other it will be visible on the site, that’s for a safeguarding reason. We don’t want any enabling behaviour for example. So we don’t allow users to message each other, but we allow you to engage with each other as much as possible via these self-help resources, which I think is really important to know, even if it’s just one other person has been through the same thing you are currently going through, it can feel like a weight’s just been lifted I think.
Ella:
Definitely, and having that, like you said forum space where you can ask for advice or even just share how you’re feeling or see other people who are feeling the same way as you are and I think for a lot of young people being able to offer advice is an amazing thing for their wellbeing too. To feel like, you know, they’re supporting others and their experiences have allowed them to help others through theirs. So that’s absolutely fantastic and I’m sure so many people feel found and seen in those forums and, you know, another thing that I thought was great is as well as the self-help resources there’s a lot of reflective space on the website for people to, you know, as well as interacting with others, help themselves and have space to work on themselves and their own wellbeing, and I think it’s like the journaling element of the online space as well? You know, it’s a really rounded experience you’re providing, from community discussions to that consultation you described as well as having space for individual reflection.
Mollie:
I love the journal. The journal is actually my favourite part of the site, and when I say that in sessions or I say it, you know, when I do professional training sessions and I’ll always get kind of puzzling looks of you offer so much on this site and the journal is your favourite part? And the reason for that is every time a young person logs into our site, the journal is the first thing they see. So they can fill that in absolutely every time they log in. If they log in they can fill that journal out. So they select an emoji, which erm, will describe obviously their mood, and they can write an example of why they’re feeling that way. So, if I was to go in and fill mine in today it would be a happy face because I’m you know doing a podcast interview about Kooth, and then you can, you know, submit it. When you go then to the actual journal, you can see exactly how you’ve been feeling every single day since you’ve logged in. So the reason it’s my favourite is because I feel like you can pick up patterns from that. You know sometimes young people will have mood swings at particular times of the month, or particular dates within the year, and they can see that in their journal and almost journal their mood and think okay well I’m having a cluster where I’ve been feeling really down, is there a particular reason for this? Was there a trigger which set off my anxiety for example, and then they can find triggers and find ways to combat that and make themselves feel better and seek support within that particular time frame. So I think that journal is a really important and really vital took for Kooth is that it allows young people to go back and monitor their mood and their behaviour and hopefully find themselves some answers as to why they feel that way.
Ella:
Yeah it’s so fantastic and I think like you said it’s amazing how, like you said, you can seek support from others but you can also kind of externalise your experiences and be able to look at them from that third person perspective and say, oh I was feeling this way on that day, and on this day I was feeling that way, and I think that’s such a valuable resource especially in an online space where again like it’s part of that anonymous element I feel where, you know, even having a journal in real life sometimes. If you’re a young person you don’t really want it in your room where maybe like a parent could find it. Having that on the site is a really, it’s a really amazing resource like everything else on the site is, it’s just generally fantastic. And I guess on that note, something more general that I’d like to ask you about Kooth is around how you make the website, you know you’ve already spoken about it in elements like the anonymity and the community, but, just in general with mental health and wellbeing being such a vulnerable topic, how Kooth makes exploring those themes safe for the young people that access the site.
Mollie:
So we have a safeguarding team that obviously, you know, work extensively to make sure our site is safe for young people, and safeguarding is the core principle of what we do. I feel like our company wouldn’t work if safeguarding wasn’t our core principle.
We age filter our site, so when young people sign up we will ask for their age. We don’t want their birthday, we just need the month and the year that they were born to check they are of age for using Kooth, and then it means that we can age filter that site so that they only see posts from young people of the same age. If not I think it’s one year above and one year below, they’ll only see posts from young people who are of a similar age. If we have an 11 year old who signs up for Kooth because they’re struggling with the transition between primary school and secondary school we don’t need them seeing posts from a 20 year old who’s posting about something that they maybe don’t understand yet, and vice versa. You know a 20 year old is coming on to talk about whatever it is that they need to talk about and they see an 11 year old who’s worried about high school, it’s not relevant to them. So we make sure we age filter the site so young people can only see posts from other young people and also receive support from other people who are of a similar age which I think is really quite important. I can still use the service, so I’m 24, Kooth goes up to the age of 25 in the Liverpool area so I can still use that service, and if I was to go on I would see posts from 23, 24 and 25 year olds and that would be perfect for me and what I would need. So I think that’s a really important part of our site that we do use that age filter. It’s also really nice for parents and carers to know that their young people are only seeing posts from people of a similar age. You know when you think about social media, when I, you know, first got a Facebook my Mum obviously said to me, you don’t add anyone you don’t know, you only add your friends, and if my friends try to add you – you check with me first that they are my friends and I feel like Kooth sort of encompasses that, making sure that you only have access to people who are of a similar age which is extremely important in terms of, you know, young people’s safety.
Ella:
Yeah that’s great and like you said, even just in keeping it relevant and meaning that, you know, I think a lot of, maybe, especially when you’re younger and you’re looking for people who’ve had shared experiences with you online there’s a lot of shifting through different things to find what, you know, what’s relevant and it’s amazing that you do that and you give people this sort of like curated community of people who are experiencing similar things to them and are at a similar point in their life, and, you know, on that similar vein of safeguarding and, you know, giving people access to the things that they need, something that’s really important to me personally is access to mental health spaces and mental health support. I think, you know, something that is specific to Liverpool and the Merseyside reason is that we have quite a chronic underfunding of mental health services here. It’s true of the whole of the UK really but especially in Merseyside people can spend years on waiting lists trying to get support and access to mental health services and something that’s great about Kooth is that one of your mission statements I guess is a commitment to making mental health services more accessible, so it would be lovely to hear a bit about that.
Mollie:
So we are a no-referral based service. You know, we do work with NHS, we work with CAHMS, Barnardo’s and we encourage them to navigate young people to our site. Even in the interim, if they’re on a wait list, a long wait list to see someone face-to-face, and they’ve been brave enough to go and ask for that face-to-face support. If they are on a long wait list we need to ensure that we’re supporting them on that interim, so you know we’re working really hard with these services to ask them to navigate young people to our site so they can have some support whilst they’re waiting for support. You know, we don’t want young people to feel like they just have to sit as a statistic on a wait list until someone can speak to them, we want to make sure that young people know we’re here for them and accessible for them.
We are a text based service, so our live chat with the councillors looks a lot like WhatsApp and you can chat back and forth with the councillor, you get an hour session a week to do that. We understand that not all SEND users will be able to use that live chat service. That time restraint for example can be quite nerve-wracking for some of our SEND users, but we’ve found that our SEND users really love our ‘message the team’ service, which used to be called ‘out of hours service’ but now it’s ‘message the team’, a bit more like emailing so you have more time to sit and type out exactly what it is that you want to say and then send it off and within 24 hours you get a reply back from one of our councillors and we’re seeing a real rise in the amount of messages that are being sent backwards and forwards between users and councillors using that ‘message the team’ service, which I think is a really nice statistic to see.
Ella:
Yeah. That’s absolutely fantastic, and I guess the other sort of element of your mission statement that I’d love to talk to you about is how you put diversity and inclusion at the heart of your services as well as accessibility. So I’d love to hear a bit about that and also just in general the ways in which Kooth removes barriers to access for marginalised groups.
Mollie:
Something I always mention, no matter what within my sessions, especially we have a wellbeing session which is extremely popular within schools, and one of the questions, you know, is do males or females experience anxiety the same? For example, and you always get answers, no females, they’re stress-heads, they’re the ones who get upset, males don’t feel it, bla bla bla bla, and they always seem shocked when I say anxiety doesn’t discriminate, okay. No matter what race or gender, no matter what sex you are, sexuality, anxiety is anxiety and if you have it you have it, it does not discriminate between anyone, and I think that’s something which Kooth really encompasses. You know we will never turn anyone away from our service, we will always make sure that we will try and provide as much support as possible. Our councillors are really good at signposting our users to various other services as well and we work really hard with other services in the area to ensure that if we’re sending people to them that they’re receiving a good amount of support and it isn’t going to be a negative experience for them. So for example, you know if a young person maybe was experiencing racism then we make sure that we know about racism challenges within the areas, and racism charities within the area so we can signpost those young people so they receive as much support as possible, and I think that’s something that we reflect as well within our promotional material. We always make sure that, you know, we’re showing diversity across there. We support LGBTQ* and we had LGBTQ* week, we made sure we had lots of LGBTQ* resources on our social medias around that, the same with on the site. So we make sure that no one feels excluded and that absolutely everybody’s welcome.
Ella:
That’s fantastic, and my last question for you today is, if you could say anything to those who are maybe not sure about taking that first step to finding mental health support, what would you say to those people.
Mollie:
I would say I understand. I understand how hard it is to take that first step. Whether it be the first step to talk to a councillor online, you know, via our site, or a councillor in person face-to-face, or even if it’s just turning to a family member or a friend and letting them know. I understand how hard that is. You know I’ve done it. When my partner and I, my boyfriend, first got together I was really worried about telling him about my anxiety and I was very, very lucky that he’s been so, so supportive, and taking that first step was the best thing I ever did. I would say that it will be the first thing that you ever do as well. Is taking that first step as I said, with a family member, with a friend, whether it be signing up to Kooth, you know you do have that anonymity which is really, really nice. It’s completely free and safe service, and all of the young people on the site that you will interact with, all of the councillors on the site, all they want to do is help you and all they want to do is make sure that you are as supported as you need to be. So, I would say be brave and take that first step to accessing that support because there’s lots of people who are willing to help you.
Ella:
Amazing. Well thank you so much for chatting with me today. I feel really enlightened about all the different services you have and I’m sure a lot of the young people listening today will be made very much aware by the amazing community that’s sort of waiting for them on Kooth and is able for them to access at any time.
Mollie:
Thank you so much this has been lovely. Thanks for having me.
Our song of the week is the melancholy ‘Bedroom’ by Merseyside based artist Jessica Luise. With vocals reminiscent of Hope Sandoval and quiet, reflective, stripped back instrumentation, this song closes the EP with a sense of nostalgia. The looking back on an intense time from the quiet of your bedroom, once the dust has settled from the fires of feeling. This song sounds like the scene where the main character takes a walk alone, perhaps swinging on a rusted swing at a local playground as the sun sets, filled with hindsight and the soft sound of looking back on what once was. We hope you enjoy.
Play Jessica Luise – Bedroom
We are Ella and Eve from Where are the Girlbands working in collaboration with Comics Youth to bring you interviews with local organisations and individuals who create safe spaces. You can find us on Instagram as @wherearethegirlbands where we celebrate women in music and discuss how to make local music scenes more accessible for everyone through reviews, video series, interviews and events! You can find more about Comics Youth on Instagram at @comicsyouth or via the website comicsyouth.co.uk. Comics Youth is a youth led organisation that aims to empower youth across the Liverpool City Region to flourish from the margins of society, creating safe spaces where young people can harness their own narratives and find confidence within a creative community. Comics Youth provide a range of creative services designed to support and amplify the often diminished voices of young people, from zine creation to youth led publishing hubs and projects such as this podcast which highlights the voices of those working within our community to create safe spaces! Thanks for listening.
