Demand across Laois for therapeutic services skyrockets

The demand for therapeutic services in Laois has skyrocketed in the last year as the true impact of the pandemic on young people and families is beginning to take hold.

Mountmellick Youth and Family Resource Centre (FRC) are among hundreds of centres across the country that are pleading with the government to provide long-term funding to allow them to continue therapeutic services in communities and reduce their growing waiting lists.

Speaking to the Leinster Express/ Laois Live this week Manager of Mountmellick FRC, Mike Farrell said they have seen the demand for therapeutic services rise by up to 70% in the last twelve months.

“Once the dust settled on the Covid restrictions and people could go back to the way things were supposed to be before Covid, it was at that stage that we saw a massive increase in referrals looking for therapeutic interventions,” he said.

“A lot of it was about anxiety and stress and worry about what it was going to be like getting back out involved in groups.

“It is only in the last year that the true impact of Covid has taken hold. For a lot of young people they missed so many different milestones, children that missed that closing off of playschool and starting primary school, teenagers moving from sixth class into first year or young people that started college for the first time and getting out and being independent for the first time, they missed all of that.

“Challenges that would have been seen as a normal part of development in the past are causing major issues for young people and for families. People’s resilience or ability to deal with things is not where it was pre-Covid. It’s only down to the studies we are doing now that we are understanding the impact of it.”

In 2023, The National ‘Recovery and Resilience Programme for Children’ grant provided once-off funding of €1,000,000 for therapeutic community supports in 83 Family Resource Centres across Ireland including Mountmellick FRC.

The local centre made the most of their allocation which allowed them to reduce their waiting list, extend their service and provide three strands of therapeutic supports to people in Mountmellick.

“The difference between a standard therapeutic intervention and one that is offered by a Family Resource Centre is the young person, the parent or the family might come in for therapy and realise we have a lot of other supports available,” explained Mr Farrell.

“If a young person comes to us and says they are having anxiety about being in social situations they can come in and get a therapeutic intervention around that issue but then we could refer them into our youth groups so they can put into practice the resilience they are developing through the therapeutic intervention.”

Mr Farrell said if long-term funding is not provided by the government they will not be able to continue to provide these therapeutic interventions.

“We were able to extend our service to people who were on our waiting list, we were able to target people who we wouldn’t have been able to target before and they have passed on and told others how good of a service the therapeutic side is,” he added.

“Now we don’t have funding to continue that so the word of mouth is out there and we are scrambling to get pieces of funding to offer therapeutic support to people. Our waiting list in each FRC is growing because we don’t have the funding to provide it on an ongoing basis.

“Our ask of the government is that if we had X amount of money we could plan around that but each year we don’t know what we are getting and it’s a scramble to try and gather money together to offer that level of support to people in our communities.”