Community Hidden Harm Awareness Team (CHHAT)
The Community Hidden Harm Awareness Team (CHHAT) works with young people across Essex who live with parents with drug or alcohol addiction or parental or carer mental health issues.
Who is CHHAT for?
Who is CHHAT for?
If you are aged 8-25, you live in Essex and you are affected by parental or familial substance misuse or mental health, we can help. This includes alcohol, illegal drug and legal drug misuse. You must be aware of the referral and consent to support before we can help you. We provide targeted early help support to improve the physical and emotional health of children and young people, and families through trauma informed one to one and groupwork.
We also support young carers in cases of historical parental or familial substance use, where the young carer may or may not still be living with the individual but is still affected by the experience.
What support do we provide?
We offer many different services. It all depends on you. Here is a list of some of the things we run to give you a better idea of what to expect once you've been assessed:
- One to one support
- Group support
- Peer support
- Strengths based support
- Activity days
- Lifeskills sessions
- Facilitated access to positive activities
- Safety planning
- Liaising with professionals
We also offer whole-family support
We can support children and young people alongside their parents/carers through:
- improving relationships/communication
- promoting uptake of positive activities
- providing advice and support around a range of issues
- supporting safety planning
- supporting parents to understand their child's emotional/physical health needs
- facilitating access to wider support around the family
- kinship work to support siblings, relatives or others who play a caring role for the child or young person
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My worker helped me come out and not bottle up my problem My worker helped me come out and not bottle up my problem
How do I access CHHAT
To make a referral or self-referral, you can phone 01245 493311 or download our form and return it to us via email. For a family referral please use this form. You will get an automated response to acknowledge that we have received your referral within 24 hours.
Following this, once a practitioner is available, they will make contact to arrange an initial assessment. If there is going to be a delay in picking up a referral you will get an additional email informing you of this.
They listened to me, I didn't feel judged for once
Get in touch
If you have a comment or question, you can email us or call 01245 493 311.
CHHAT Project
The Children’s Society East
114 Springfield Road,
Chelmsford,
CM2 6LF
