“When you’re a young person, your identity is so malleable… It’s very easy for a label to become enmeshed with your sense of identity”. Agency and mental health are intrinsically related. Most mental health problems appear before the age of 25, at a time when people are still developing their sense of agency. The sense of agency is that feeling that you can shape your own life through actions and decisions. When young people seek help from mental health professionals, they put their trust in these professionals. Practitioners need to be mindful of how their words may support or obstruct a young person’s sense of agency. In this Lecture, Rose McCabe, Lisa Bortolotti and Michele Lim, will analyse a series of recorded encounters between young people and mental healthcare practitioners in emergency services. They will analyse in which ways the communication validates the young person’s experience, whether it legitimized their choice to seek help, if it refrained from objectifying the young person, if it affirmed their capacity to contribute to positive change and if it involved them in the decision-making process.