ABSTRACT
The founders of the Young People’s Counselling Service (YPCS) thought it important to provide young people with the opportunity to talk to a professional about psychological and emotional difficulties. A. Dartington, writing about the YPCS, notes that as the Service is set up to be time-limited and to offer a contract of just four meetings, it tends to cater for a “particularly ambivalent” constituency. The group process in the weekly supervision seminar held for all YPCS therapists is an important facet of the overall process. While the origins of the YPCS were in the context of recognizing a lack of facilities for young people, in the early 2000s the lack of service provision that specifically embraced questions of race and culture led to the establishment of the Young Black People’s Consultation Service. The new Service adopted key aspects of the YPCS model, psychoanalytically informed, and embodying the kind of informality and lack of interference at the heart of the intervention.
