This Children's Mental Health Week, Sarah and Shahid from our co-production team talk about why they're passionate about putting young people at the centre of mental health services.
A new mental health awareness scenario has been added to the courses on offer at SkillZONE, Gloucestershire’s safety education centre.
This week is Children’s Mental Health Week, so 2gether NHS Foundation Trust and SkillZONE are pleased to be able to launch this module for young people across Gloucestershire, to raise awareness of positive mental health and wellbeing.
SkillZONE, in Tuffley Lane, Gloucester, is a state-of-the-art life-size village, which provides a fully interactive learning environment to teach people of all ages how to recognise dangerous situations and stay safe.
Kathryn Charlesworth, a social inclusion development worker with 2gether, has been involved in putting the new scenario together. She explained: “We’d been involved in incorporating mental health awareness into a similar project in Hereford and wanted to make it Trust-wide by including it at SkillZONE.
Children and young people visiting two of 2gether NHS Foundation Trust’s sites will now have access to new interactive games, thanks to a generous donation from the Pied Piper Appeal.
The charity, which helps sick and disadvantaged children, has donated the interactive screens, complete with a built-in seat, to the Trust’s waiting rooms in Gloucester and Cheltenham. Visitors to the Children and Young Person Service (CYPS) at Acorn House, Gloucester, and Evergreen House, Cheltenham, have been putting the screens to good use while waiting for appointments.
It is 40 years since the seminal description of ‘Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy’ (MSbP) by UK Paediatrician Professor Sir Roy Meadow.1 There have been a number of developments since, which include terminology, definition, prevalence and management. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) adopted the term ‘Fabricated or Induced Illness by Carers’ (FII) in 2002,2 and updated their guidance in 2009.3 The most recent version of the RCPCH Child Protection Companion extended FII to embrace perplexing presentations with suggestions for management.4 The important evolution in the UK has been towards earlier diagnosis and intervention without the need for proof of deliberate deception. . To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
The Specialist Health and Resilient Environment (SHARE) is a joint partnership between Wigan Council and our Trust which gives children and young people specialist support at a time when they have significant mental health concerns such as self-harming or thoughts about taking their own life.
As part of the project a dedicated home, which is registered with Ofsted, has been created with bedrooms that allow young people a place to stay for up to 72 hours with staff on hand 24 hours a day to offer support. It also offers them space to go and get advice and a place to talk to staff when they need it.
YOUNG people have shared their experiences of mental ill health, the treatment they received and the improvements they would love to make through a media project.
Tom, Ellie, Jenn and Emily have all been supported by the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) at our Trust and are now transitioning out from the service
A programme funded by NHS health and care quality improvement organisation Advancing Quality Alliance offered them the opportunity to take part in People’s Voice Media’s Community Reporter Programme which gives people a platform to have a voice and to challenge perceptions about their communities.
Supported by Knowsley CAMHS consultants Dr Tessa Myatt and Dr Marian Catalan, the teenagers worked together to produce a video focusing on their personal experiences of CAMHS, how they feel about the transition to adult services and any improvements they would like to see.
There are many effective psychological therapies to help teenagers with depression, anxiety or other mental health problems. Unfortunately, for various reasons, most teenagers never get access to a professional therapist. To overcome this problem, some researchers are exploring the potential of brief, “single-session” interventions that can be delivered cheaply and easily to many at-risk teenagers outside of a clinical context. In The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Jessica Schleider and John Weisz at Harvard University present extremely promising results from their trial of a 30-minute computer session teaching depressed and anxious teenagers that personality is malleable.
Innovations Project (IP) was a new multidisciplinary team based within an inner city, walk-in health centre, North East England (throughout 2011). The aim was to describe the social and mental disorders of the hard to reach young people (HTRYP) from the IP and compare with a matched sample who attended a Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) and follow-up both samples 24 months after discharge. Please contact the library to request a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
The aim of this study was to test whether a cognitive-behavioral and mindfulness-based group sleep intervention would improve behavior problems in at-risk adolescents, and whether these improvements were specifically related to improvements in sleep. Please contact the library to request a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
This study identified disruption in interhemispheric circuitry (i.e., fractional anisotropy alterations in the corpus callosum) as a shared feature of ASD, ADHD, and OCD. However, fractional anisotropy alterations may be more widespread and severe in ASD and ADHD than in OCD. Higher fractional anisotropy throughout the brain appears to be related to better adaptive function across NDDs. Login using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens for full text. SSOTP - You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
School nurses are often described as the ‘best placed’ professionals to provide early mental health interventions. Maya Motamedi asks whether this is really the case and discusses the changes needed to ensure they are. Login using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens details for full text. SSOTP - You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you requesting.
Our ChildrePhoto of CAMHS participation teamn and Young People’s Mental Health (CAMHS) participation team covering Swindon, Wiltshire, Bath and northeast Somerset have been working with young people to challenge misconceptions about mental health.
Over this summer, young people working with the team developed three short films, which they hope will be included in school PHSE packs. The films talk frankly about mental health issues and the need to seek support.
The mother of child who has transitioned socially from girl to boy says the fear that children are being rushed into life-changing decisions is misplaced. In reality, families are struggling alone with hugely challenging issues
This is the story of a mum looking for care for her child. A mum who would do anything to help that child, but who has been trapped in a system that struggles to provide appropriate care.
To read the full article, log in using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens details. SSOTP - You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
Confidentiality in child and adolescent mental health is a complex and often challenging matter. Not only do young people frequently present to services in situations of risk, they often prefer to keep information confidential from parents and/or other professionals. This article explores confidentiality in the context of child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS), particularly when the clinician is having to make decisions on whether to maintain or to breach it. Login using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens for full text. SSOTP - request a copy of the article from the library - www.sssft.nhs.uk/library
Open access. Supporting the education of children and young people with complex emotional mental health difficulties requires schools to have knowledge of their needs. Exchanging information about less visible mental health difficulties is, however, known to be complex. Exploring the perceptions of young people experiencing problems can explicate some of this complexity and identify solutions. Yet their views are rarely given credence in this context.
An essential part of the mental health assessment is to evaluate the risk of harm to self. Fundamentally this involves asking directly about self-harming behaviour and suicidal thoughts or urges, but practitioners often find it difficult to open up these conversations.
This evaluation of risk is particularly important as self-harm and suicidal thoughts are frequently found in young people who attend mental health services. Login using your SSSFT NHS OpenAthens for full text. SSOTP - You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.