Young people often hide their fears and anxieties about the future, but a Perth youth support group, Insa!n Youth, founded by Sain Dzemail in 2013, is pursuing new avenues to help young people connect with their vision and give them the tools to make their ideal future happen.

His first exposure to youth work was in year seven. One school day his principal found him and his sister and told them that their mother wasn’t picking them up that afternoon. She was receiving treatment for her mental health, and a youth worker called Sarah would be taking them home instead.

Over time, Sarah would pick them up more often, eventually visiting the house and helping Mr Dzemail’s mother to take care of the family. Eventually he and his sister were referred to Anchors, a youth service run through the City of Joondalup.

But his outlook on life changed. He disengaged from the world around him, putting on an angry, stand-offish persona, and pushing others away.

He shows me a photo and says, “That’s me in school uniform, well, not following it. Some teachers would look at that kid and go he’s angry, standoffish, I’m not going to deal with him today. But some teachers could see straight through it. After a time, my youth worker realised that music is what engaged me.”

He went to DJ hip hop program run by the City of Joondalup where he learned how to mix music and while he mixed, he’d talk to his support worker about his troubles.

“It was a clever way to get a kid to engage, different to the clinical conversations that most other places used, and it worked. I went to this program for nearly two years, really took advantage of it, and got really good at mixing music.”

Dzemail said he was signed to a Perth record label at 16 years old, and began performing shows in Perth nightclubs, learned how to organise events, and used those skills and his connections in the youth support industry to run underaged events helping other young people to engage with a new environment.

He has lived experience of being a troubled teenager, and how engaging with youth through non-traditional methods is an effective way to reach someone who has become disengaged with their environment.

“Next thing you know I’m teaching kids how to mix music. I didn’t want to talk to them about their problems and their anxieties, I just wanted to show them how to make music. But the team said that I was good at connecting and engaging with kids, and that I should study youth work,”

“I started my certificate three in community services youth work at 18, then started counselling. I went to work in juvenile detention at Rangeview and Banksia Hill,”

With his his counselling certificate, Mr Dzemail began a psychology degree, and started more clinical format sessions with young people. He didn’t feel like he was making a difference, that the clients he spoke to weren’t listening to him or engaging with the sessions he held.

“So, I asked a kid, ‘if you could do anything, what would you want? Full freedom, anything’.”

“Sain, anything?”

“Anything.”

“I want to be a car salesman.”

“Out of anything he could have said, he said car salesman. I asked him why and his response was; ‘Dude, I just want to know what it’s like to wear a suit’.”

Mr Dzemail remembers his first trial of a new therapy technique.

This was the start of the Insa!n approach. All of the questions they ask are specifically designed to form a clear picture of what the child wants their future to look like. Then they ask the child what they think will stop their future from happening.

“I realised that I just need to give the kids the freedom to share what they do and don’t want in a safe environment. If they don’t have the language to communicate it, they can use pictures, TikTok videos, Instagram Reels. They went bonkers on it, and I realised I was getting a much clearer picture into what the child wanted for their future,” Mr Dzemail says.

In 2016, the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Western Australia initiated a study in which 92 children under the supervision of the youth justice system were interviewed about what led them to commit offences, and how they saw their future.

The participants identified key themes such as a lack of positive role models, unsafe or unstable living environments, lack of participation in gainful education or employment, lack of involvement in their community or activities they enjoy, and inaccessible youth support or therapy.

Significantly, these individuals and their families raised desires to be consulted about support tailored to their needs, and resources made available specific to the individual. They also expressed a desire for stable living environments and constructive futures.

Provisional psychologist Justin Chan who works in Geraldton recognises the difficulties in child therapy, and how to engage and help a young person through the hardships they are experiencing.

“We live in a fast-paced world, and the youth that I see struggle to keep up with it. They come and see me and express their ongoing concerns about anxiety, depression, trouble in school and comparing themselves to their friends. Often, they are concerned that their grades aren’t great, and they don’t know what career they wish to pursue,” he says.

Chan works in a clinic, taking one on one therapy sessions with a wide range of clients, including children.

“A lot of youth issues are related to anxiety and depression, and a lot of it comes from people around them knowing what they want to do in life, while they themselves don’t really know.”

Working in a clinic, his therapy is based on traditional methods, building rapport with the client before focusing on deeper issues and trying to understand how they feel and how to address the difficulties that they are experiencing.

“The effectiveness of traditional methods are dependent on the person that I am seeing. So, I will bring up solution focused therapy. It’s quite simple, we don’t focus on the concern per se, instead what solutions or goals we can find to rectify those concerns,” he says.

“But ultimately, outside of the counselling room it goes back to the client. I can’t surveil them, it just doesn’t work that way, but we give them things to do, like homework. It’s reliant on the client’s engagement with the therapy, all I can give them is the ideas or tools to build that solution.”

But the depth of these issues are far more pronounced in Indigenous youth, where the same issues are more deep-seated, and harder to engage with.

“Cross-cultural comparisons here in Geraldton show a big discrepancy between typical Caucasian youth and Indigenous Australian youth. There’s a difference in the level of how entrenched these feelings of anxiety, depression, and concern for their futures are in their mentality. We use the same treatment for everyone, but that entrenchment creates difficulty in how effective our therapy can be,” Chan says.

This entrenchment is exactly what Insain focuses on. Their approach is tailored to youth that has disengaged, aiming to reach them on a more personal level, and re-engaging them with their ambitions and outlook to their future.

“We don’t call our staff youth workers, psychologists, counsellors, mentors, clinicians, because people don’t want to go ‘I just had a session with my counsellor or my therapist the other day.’ We call our staff vision agents because we work on young people’s vision. We use ‘agent’ because want to empower young people,” Dzemail says.

When engaging young people in their futures, in-school programs are an important method of creating awareness in the youth about what skills and requirements they need to realise their career goals.

High school student Benjamin S. said that the program that is run by his school allowed him to better understand what he needed to do in order to build a career in physiotherapy.

“At my school we have a career coordinator, and he took us for a class called ‘life skills.’ I really enjoyed that class because it was fun even though it was a serious topic, we learnt about what degrees or options we had to achieve our career goals,” he said.

Mr Chan also sees the importance of strong youth support in school environments.

“Prevention in always better than intervention in my opinion. Support programs in schools help to stop mental health issues from occurring. Once a child is entrenched in a negative mental space, it takes a lot of time and effort to help them to get out. It can also reach a wider audience than one to one therapy,” he says.

“A lot of the time, a child thinks they need to do it alone, or that others won’t help them. Obviously, it’s not the case, organisations within social work and youth support domains are very good at actively engaging youth to builds up their skills and jumpstart them with their futures.”

Benjamin also spoke on that lack of communication between peers when they struggle at school, and how none of his friend group speaks about whether they are doing poorly in classes, they are worried about school, or if they are not getting enough support from their parents.

“I am aware of their situations, but we don’t really talk about it,” he says.

Insain Youth wants to change this norm and help disaffected youth to communicate their goals, gain the skills they need to build their futures, be a place they can ask for help, and to connect their clients with people in the industries that they want to start a career in. They’ve seen success in their new therapy method, listening to the vision of the young people they work with, and helping them to build relationships with industry professionals that represent the goal that they want to attain.

Benjamin agreed with that idea. “Seeing someone in the industry you want to go into would be beneficial, you get a firsthand experience, and you’ll learn what you need to know to be able to achieve your goal,” he says.

If you are experiencing mental health issues, contact the 24/7 BeyondBlue hotline: 1300 224 636
If you or someone you know are in crisis call triple zero (000).
You can also call the 24/7 Lifeline hotline: 13 11 14