The Okehampton-based children’s mental health charity Tor Support Services has reported a 20 percent increase in the number of children supported by the service between April 2021 to March 2022 from the previous year.

The counselling service’s announcement of the year-on-year increase came during Children’s Mental Health week, which ran from February 6-12, as data revealed that the number of children receiving counselling under the service had risen from 128 to 159.

Helene Cox from the Tor Support Services, said: ‘For the first time we exceeded 200 referrals to the Tor Support. We actually counted 159 young people, and that’s up from 128 the previous year, which was already up from the previous year and we’ve delivered about 1,400 family counselling sessions. Again, that’s a significant increase on the previous year. We’re running about 50 counselling sessions a week and we’ve increased the number of counsellors that we use in volunteers and unpaid counsellors and some of them are doing more hours.’

Experts at the counselling service have said that counsellors are still dealing with mental health problems brought about by the pandemic, particularly among primary age children, and have also noted an increase in the number of children suffering with gender dysphoria.

However, the service is now starting to see children affected by the cost of living crisis and only expect to see more cases.

Ms Cox said: ‘We are seeing an increase in need and that’s going back prior to the cost of living crisis and we are still responding to that because these things take time. It certainly wasn’t noticeable for a while. Now we’re probably going to see some consequences of the cost of living crisis coming. Things change all the time and evolve.’

The extra demand on the mental health service comes at a time when the Tor Support Services is facing increasing costs as well and is in need of funding to support the increase number of children using the service.

Ms Cox added: ‘I suppose our message is that everything that we do requires funding and we are battling to make sure that we can raise funds to allow us to support local young people. Can we do that in a climate where a lot of funding pots are very conscious of the cost of living crisis?

‘We anticipate it’s going to be slightly more competitive environment. But that’s our challenge; to keep up and make sure we can respond efficiently and swiftly to local demands.’

It is not all bad news though. Ms Cox added that the services new base in Okehampton College had provided it with more space with better facilities in order to run more counselling sessions and had started to collaborate with the local primary care network to provide extra counselling sessions to children outside the area covered by the Tor Support Services.

Two additional counsellors now work on Saturday mornings to support those children, referred through the Okehampton Medical Centre, outside the Tor Support Services catchment area.

To donate visit www.justgiving.com/torsupportservices.