Mr. Conor Boksberger:

It can. It was something we were acutely aware of during the pandemic and that forced a lot of innovation in how we did things. However, we did not stay out of the buildings very long because it quickly became apparent that, despite having access to trained mental health professionals by phone or video, the lived experience of some young people does not allow it. We work with people aged from 12 years to 25 years. This means we have college students who might be in digs or sharing a room, but we also have the young girl in the north inner city sharing a two-bedroom flat with four siblings who are running around and other people who just do not have access to privacy. We were always clear we needed to be able to offer something realistic. It is not good enough to have something if it is not accessible.

To speak more broadly on the impact of things like housing, we recently published our conceptualisation of mental health, in terms of what we believe around it.

It is very much based in that social determinants of health model, in that we recognise that the lived experience of us all has an impact on how we feel, day to day. We do not want to go down the line of pathologising a young person who is living in a precarious situation and say that they are anxious. Of course, they are anxious; they are right to be anxious. For example, if I am a young person living in homelessness accommodation and I not know whether my family will get to stay there for a week, a month or a year, and I do not know why mum is upset all the time, of course I will feel sad and anxious. We do need to create spaces, supports and resources but we also have to look at the broader structural issues, because we cannot keep patching over where the problems keep getting created for young people.