Health News - Charity reveals effects of unemployment on young, as woman tells her own harrowing story

Published: 13 January, 2011
by TOM FOOT

Fears for health of jobless youths

ROSIE Knight was just 17 years old when family problems forced her to leave home in Camden Town.

A bright A-level student who had done well in her A/S levels, she found herself living in a Marylebone hostel.

“I found myself alone with no idea what I was going to do with my life,” she said. “I was relying on benefits. It was a ter­rible trap. It wasn’t long before I became clinically depressed.”

“I tried to stay on at school while I was homeless and I did for a while. It was a weird thing to do – I was living in a squat one night and then I’d be looking for some other people to hang out with for another day.”

In the end Rosie dropped out of school. But unable to work, she said the days felt never ending. With nothing to do, she had too much time to think about her problems and began drinking.

“The worst thing about unemployment is the boredom,” she said. “I had a million things running through my head and it made me feel really anxious. When you’re unemployed, you have no responsibilities, so you have no reason to act responsibly.”

A report published this week by the Prince’s Trust warned that youth unemployment is creating a mental health hazard. Panic attacks, depressions and self-loathing are prevalent among the jobless, according to the Trust’s Macquarie Youth Index (MYI), a study of 2,170 16 to 25-year-olds.

It found that one in four young people suffers from insomnia, 23 per cent self-harm and more than one in six feel depressed “all” or “most” of the time.

Rosemary Watt-Wyness, the Prince’s Trust acting regional director for London and the South-East, said: “Unemployment presents a very real and frightening mental health problem for young Londoners – and the longer they are out of work, the greater the risk.”

She said the report – which gauges happiness across a range of areas from family life to phys­ical and emotional health – paints a “bleak picture” of life for the young generation.

Rosie moved out of the hostel shortly after finding a part-time job in a bar and volunteering in the day. 

She used her experience of unemployment and homelessness to set up a community project helping jobless young people with the help of a grant from the Prince’s Trust.

She has campaigned to raise awareness about mental health and quizzed former Prime Minister Gordon Brown about funding at a post-budget debate.

Rosie has also helped young deaf people find work, learned sign language. Now 22, she is a  one-to-one carer, working full-time with a young boy with ADHD and Asperger’s syndrome.

She said: “Working with the Trust made me realise I wanted to help others through my work. My life has now completely changed. I am so happy to be doing a job I love.”

• For more information about the Prince’s Trust, call 0800 842 842 or ­visit www.princes-trust.org.uk