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The Young People's Consultation Service (YPCS) was set up in 1961 by the Youth Studies and Research Foundation which itself was one of a number of projects financed by a Dutch charitable foundation. It was initially based in a non-institutional building and staffed by psychoanalytically trained psychologists and social workers. The founders proposed a service
independent of the adolescent's world of authority, to which young people may come and discuss their immediate problems without any need for a deep or permanent relationship being created … The adolescents, by discussion with well-trained advisers, can work out their own problems and attain insight into them so that they may return to their milieu and make growth and progress.
In 1967 the service transferred to the NHS and found a home in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic, Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust, London.
The YPCS accepts self-referrals only and offers up to four weekly therapeutic consultation sessions to people aged 16 to 30 who have a personal or emotional problem they feel they would like to talk about. The four therapeutic consultations aim to encourage a process of self-discovery rather than dependency.
When Ms A, a 23-year-old white woman, contacted the YPCS, she told the administrator that she felt low all the time and lacked motivation. Over the first three sessions I learned that she was about to start a permanent job, having been temping and travelling for two years. She described having experienced lengthy periods of depression which she felt she had only recognized recently. Her depression was presented as inevitable because her father and elder brother were both chronically depressed. She had felt obliged to be a bright and lively child to make up for her brother's failure to make a success of his life but this in turn provoked his envy and jealousy.