Child and Adolescent Mental Health (CAMHS)

The team work hard to make sure you don’t have to wait too long for an appointment. We are working to reduce our waiting times to ensure that every young person is  seen within 18 weeks of their referral being made. However currently there is waiting list for the CAMH Service. Some self help information is listed below and it might be helpful for you to try some of the strategies suggested whilst you are waiting.

We ask that referrers provide us with as much information as they can at the point of referral, which helps us decide how to process your referral. If the referral is not appropriate we will write to you and let you know and will do our best to signpost you to a service that is more appropriate.

When we are able to offer you an appointment, we will write to you and ask you to get in touch. It is important that you read this letter very carefully as it will have a contact number for you to phone and arrange an appointment.

If for whatever reason you don’t get in touch, we will write to you again asking you to telephone and make an appointment. If you don’t respond to this second letter we will assume you no longer want an appointment with us and will discharge you and write to the person who referred you to advise.

Young Children: We request that parents/guardians of young children come to the first appointment as its important to meet you and gather as much information as possible. We might ask to have some time with you alone without your child present.

Older Children:  We prefer young people to bring their guardians to a first appointment. We would like to be able to gather information from all family members. If there are things you want to talk about privately with us, without your family present, we will give you the time and space to do this. There are times, if we are very concerned about a young person’s safety, that we have to speak to their parent/guardian. We would always try to let you know how and why we are doing this.

Your first appointment will last around 60-90 minutes. We would always take account of how a child/young person is managing the appointment and time can be adjusted to suit them.

We currently have Primary Mental Health Workers within NHS Forth Valley who work closely with childrens services and agencies that work with child. Their main responsibility is to build capacity and confidence of other agencies to allow them to provide early intervention to support the mental health and emotional wellbeing of children, young people and their families.

They also provide low intensity and low level interventions for children where milder difficulties have been noted. This means that if you are referred to CAMHS you may be seen by a PMHW if your difficulties have been present for less than 1 year and you haven’t had a lot of support for any other services before being referred to CAMHS. Primary Mental Health Workers work in the same way as other members of the team except that are unable to undertake specialist diagnostic assessments for things like ADHD or children with autistic profiles.

Once we have gathered all of the information required to help us understand how best to help. Where appropriate we look at how we can use your family’s strengths, skills and abilities to help the situation. We will then discuss with you how we will work together with you on the problems you have identified and the goals you want to achieve

All treatment offered is evidence based so has been researched thoroughly to ensure that the particular difficulty experienced by the child or young person is addressed using the most effective treatment available.

It may be that you will remain seeing the clinician who first assessed you but depending on the presenting difficulties you may need intervention from another member of the team.

Sometimes only a few meetings are needed and sometimes it takes longer. This will regularly be reviewed with you.

Once we have an understanding of your difficulties, we may offer a therapeutic intervention to try and address them. As with assessment, an intervention will be delivered in a way that suits you/your child. Sometimes a combination of different interventions will work best. We will always discuss with you what type of intervention we would recommend and why. The interventions we offer include:

• Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)
• Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
• Family Based Therapy (FBT)
• Partnership Groups for Parents e.g. ADHD, ASD and SMARTS
• Attachment based therapies
• ADHD monitoring/behavioural interventions
• Medication monitoring
• Mindfulness based therapies
• EMDR (a specialist intervention for trauma)
• Behavioural Family Therapy (BFT)
• Group based interventions
• Speclialist consultations with other professionals

We understand this may be a difficult time for you and you may be nervous about coming. Don’t worry, we are here to help. 1 in 10 young people experience mental health difficulties therefore we have lots of experience of helping young people and families

• We will probably ask you and your family a lot of questions. We might ask a bit about you/your child’s school, what you like to do in your spare time, who lives with you and what your likes and dislikes are.
• We will ask what your current concerns are, when you first noticed these concerns and how it affects you (e.g. how it feels, if it has changed how you behave) and other people in your family.
• We will ask you if there are/have been any significant life events happening within the family such as divorce or bereavement.
• We will also ask you or your parent about your early development, like how you managed in nursery or at primary school.
• We will ask what has been tried in the past to help, what has worked and what has not.
• We will ask what changes you would like to make and what your want to achieve from coming to CAMHS. We may also ask about the timing of the referral ie why now, what has changed?

We will always be guided by you/your child as to what you/they feel comfortable talking about and there will be no pressure to discuss anything you are not ready to.

You might want to write things down on a piece of paper to help you remember what you would like to say in the appointment. You might like to write down examples of your concerns, if you have noticed any patterns to your problems, what helps and what doesn’t.

You can bring someone along that you trust for support, if you would like to and you can also take notes.

Once we have gathered all of the information required to help us understand how best to help, we will make a plan together about how to we help. Sometimes we need to ask other professionals for their assessment (Speech and Language Therapist for example) or we send Questionnaires out to the school and gather information from you from questionnaires.  We may also need to gather a more indepth developmental history that will ask questions about your child as a baby and their developmental stages.

We will discuss ending your appointments with you, taking into account your feelings and opinions regarding this. Ending an intervention normally happens over an agreed period of time so that you feel prepared to be discharged.