‘I Didn’t Know It Was Okay to Ask for Help’: One Angus School Leaver’s Story

Robbie was seventeen when he finished school, and by October he was working long early-morning shifts at a logistics depot outside Arbroath and telling everyone he was absolutely fine. He was not. The friendships that had structured his whole social world had scattered — one friend to Edinburgh, two to Dundee, several still at school studying for Highers — and the routine that had carried him through every day of his life had dissolved overnight. ‘I just didn’t really know what to do with myself that wasn’t work and then staring at my phone,’ he says now. ‘I was tired all the time and not in a physical way.’

Robbie had heard about Caldera’s workshops through a leaflet picked up at Carnoustie library, and a friend who had attended a session earlier in the year. He almost didn’t go. ‘I thought it would be like a school assembly where someone tells you to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables. I nearly didn’t bother.’ What he found instead was a full-day session covering stress management, sleep, how to talk to a doctor about mental health, and practical budgeting — delivered by facilitators who, as Robbie puts it, ‘talked to us like we were adults who were dealing with real things, which we were.’

The session on mental health self-advocacy proved to be the turning point. Facilitators walked the group through how to describe low mood to a GP, what questions to expect, and what support options existed locally — not as a lecture, but as a rehearsed conversation that participants took turns practising. ‘I’d never even thought about going to the doctor for something that wasn’t a physical thing,’ Robbie admits. ‘I thought it was a bit dramatic. But we did this thing where we actually said the words out loud and it just made it feel normal and possible.’

Three weeks later, Robbie booked a GP appointment. He was referred to a community counselling service through NHS Tayside and attended six sessions over the winter. He credits the Caldera workshop not with solving his problems — ‘that’s not really how it works’ — but with making it possible for him to believe that asking for help was a reasonable and adult thing to do. ‘Before, I think I had this idea that struggling was just part of getting on with it. The workshop kind of challenged that without making me feel like I was being told off.’

Robbie’s experience is not unusual among Caldera participants. The transition out of school is statistically one of the highest-risk periods for the emergence of mental health difficulties in young men in particular, and one of the periods when formal support is hardest to access — because young people are no longer connected to school pastoral systems but have not yet built relationships with adult services. Caldera sits in that gap, offering a non-clinical, peer-proximate environment where young people can absorb information and begin to shift their relationship with their own wellbeing.

Today Robbie has moved to a different job, one with more sociable hours, and has started playing five-a-side football on Tuesday evenings — something that sounds small but that he describes as genuinely anchoring. He still thinks about the workshop. ‘I tell people about it,’ he says. ‘When someone I know is leaving school I tell them to go. Not because it fixes everything, but because it makes you feel like you’re not the only person trying to figure all this out.’