To think CHAMS is shit

[shockandawe]

To not even see my ds, and close the referral without even meeting us.

I really fee like not sending my ds to senior school in September. He has such noticeable tics that I really fear the issue will be a whole lot worse once at secondary.

Aibu? Don't mind to hear if I am.

Believe me everyone that I know at our CAMHS and other CAMHS would deadly love, more than anything, to be able to really use our skills and provide responsive and quick support and to take all the time needed afterwards. There is nothing more satisfying than working together with a family and/or child or adolescent and seeing a real change in them. It's why we all do the work, it's one of the most rewarding jobs ever. It's utterly frustrating not to be able to work in the way we could and should because of lack of resources.

My child has been under camhs for four years now. The help can be very hit or miss. But I fought like fuck to get him seen. Camhs and the Paediatrician wouldn't take him on to begin with but for seven months kept throwing his case at each other. In the end I had to phone up lots to chase up and politely pester. I think as the threshold for help is very high, the next level of people who are seen are those who don't give up at this first hurdle. It's taken seven years for an ASD diagnosis which was obvious to me since he was two.

I want to add that still, despite the underfunding and cuts, very good work is being done often with people staying late at the clinic etc. Of course mistakes will be made, that's inevitable and awful when it happens.

No one mentionedand this needs to also be taken into accountthe huge finding issues social services have, which have a knock on effect on us, as many CAMHS cases should really be social care cases but don't get accepted by social care.

MN really needs an edit button!! I cringe at all the spelling mistakes of my posts! Sorry!

They have failed my 14yr old dd horribly.
She lashed out and hit me in front of them, which they then said they didn't see, put her on antidepressants without my knowledge even though they had it on record she had taken an overdose, and I'm constantly walking on eggshells not to get beaten up in my own home.
I fucking hate them and what they have done to me and dd.w

I've found them to be hopeless. Utterly, hopeless.

My dd was referred to CAMHS and was shunted off to a Young People's service for counselling. The counsellor clearly had no experience of autism and did more harm than good.

What is interesting is dd was finally referred to a specific young people's MH service. She has access to a psychologist, psychiatrist and MH nurse. They have an assessment process that can go on for months.

I wonder where their funding comes from and why CAMHS can't have the same?

What is really shit is the appalling underfunding of children's mental health services. There are, quite literally, children whose lives are being put at risk because of this.

Stillloving, can I ask why CAMHS can't give any advice?
We asked several times with both ds1 and 2 for practical advice, book recommendations, anything that might help us, every single time they said it was beyond their remit.
We had no help whatsoever.
Our area is known for not being very good though, so not saying that all of CAMHS is rubbish!

I also offered to liaise between school, CAMHS and autism outreach when they wanted a meeting - CAMHS and outreach were happy with this, the headteacher put her foot down and wouldn't allow it

We hope we'll never need their services again, with all the twisting they did in the few weeks they held ds's case open, we were at a point where we were starting to feel concerned at where they were headed.

Philphilconnors I really couldn't comment without knowing the context of the particular case etc. CAMHS does offer lots of advice and guidance for neurodevelopmental cases from what I know but then again it has to do with the particular clinician too. As I said I have no way of knowing what happened there. Also you have to consider that not all CAMHS teams are the same so what goes on in one doesn't in another.

And yy to the poster who said they don't accept children with ASD (think it was Branleuse?)
When the statistics for suicide amongst adults with ASD are so high, why on earth are CAMHS ignoring our children who we are already concerned about? Surely they should be acknowledging the higher suicide rates and trying to do something to tackle it?

We were told over and over again that our son did not have any mental health problems. I have just been sitting with him for over an hour as he sobbed about SATs because he's so anxious about them, and tells me that he wishes he was dead. They identified him as anxious then turned it around onto us. They changed what we said, wrote it down in a different context and have presented it to us as fact, and when we pointed it out to them, they acted as if we were going mad. (Isn't that gas lighting?)

I still feel that children shouldn't suffer as a result of underfunding.

I'm pleased to hear that some have found CAMHS to be helpful to their dc.

I suppose it like every other nhs service which can vary vastly across the country.

My phone keeps changing CAMHS to CHAMS, wish I could edit the title.

TimeToMuskUp I'm in Warwickshire, the waiting times are shocking. We waited two years from referral to first appointment. The excuse that they couldn't find any Ed Psychs to work here or that they had received extra funding for a locum to bring the list down was trotted out for two long years. It took a formal complaint for anyone to return the five phone calls I had made to enquire how much longer it would be. Our Consultant wrote to them twice and still nothing happened.

I know the longest wait last year for assessment was 110 weeks. It isn't acceptable that any child waits that long for assessment, especially as CAMHS seem to be the gatekeepers to further support.

Camhs gave my son his life back.

Camhs have been good for us but it took eighteen months from DD1s attempted suicide (at the age of six!) to getting 1 to 1 therapy for her. That was because a professional expert (independent from Camhs) lobbied them to do something with her on our behalf.
Even back then, two and a half years ago, the threshold was very high. It's even higher now.

The main issues are funding, lack of tier two services (services that support children and families that don't meet the threshold for Camhs) and shit parents who won't accept that they are shit parents that take up too much time.

Seriously, I have spent over a hundred hours in Camhs waiting rooms and the way that some parents speak to their children, in public, is heartbreaking.

In my area, cahms has been great and do see ASD children. still was right in that in our case a shit tier. 2 service, a very shit community pead and school nurse did not have the ability or experience to see our dds ASD. A tier 2 child psycologist essentially blamed me being neurotic and my experience with infertility and stillbirth as being responsible for thinking my dd had ASD. She was only 6 when she attempted to cut her wrists with a knife and paper clip. At this point, our family was at breaking point. We were referred to cahms ( not for ASD assessment at this point) and the psych we saw immediately suspected ASD. Such a fucking relief to finally have an experienced professional well-versed in more 'subtle' presentations of ASD.

Still encountered lots of waiting on ASD pathway, but we begin seeing a child psych in a couple of weeks to help us with the more challenging aspects of dds behavior. It's no miracle cure, but I have some faith it will help.

There are still flaws in the cahms help we are receiving, no Ot referral, no salt referral. It's expected that we learn the skills to help dd. that's a bit shit, but after years of being told by 'professionals' that I'm neurotic and wrong, cahms have really been helpful to us.

I completely understand that this is not the same experience for all.

Ds has a CAMHS appointment this week after a referral from GP. Waiting time has been 3 months which is better than I expected tbh. They previously diagnosed ds 4 years ago then removed him form their service as he wouldn't engage. I'm not sure he will engage now tbh but this is the only service that may help us according to GP. I don't know if this is Tier 2 or 3 though - how can I tell?

In our team and in most big CAMHS teams as far as I know we have a waiting list of about 5 weeks for first appointment and after that happens, the clinician does normally see the family for a series of appointments. How frequently that is and how many appointments varies.

But then if a specialist assessment (eg ASD / ADHD assessment) is needed or an internal referral for a specific therapy (CBT / psychotherapy / family therapy) then the waiting list for that is longer eg a few months (up to 6 months). However, during the period of waiting, my experience has been that the family is still seen occasionally by the general clinician they have been assigned to. So in my particular clinic there is an effort to see families asap and we do manage but the funding issue means that many clinicians get burn out / quit etc or that occasionally jobs are lost due to funding. Underfunding is not an excuse, it is THE main issue.

In terms of some of the issues you describe, yes it may be that they would fall under Tier 2 rather than Tier 3. Tier 3 which is CAMHS basically means a mental health difficulty that is entrenched, ongoing and manifests itself in a few areas of life (school / home / peer relations etc). There's a list of criteria. Lower grade anxiety / milder depression / more straightforward behavioural issues should normally be dealt with in community mental health teams eg through the GP's counselling service / within the school / early intervention services etc. School counsellors are excellent at things like that. But as I said again due to underfunding these services are cut to the bone. Meaning that then those problems escalate, people want to go to CAMHS (understandably), but then CAMHS can't manage. Plus as I said the endless social care referrals that really we shouldn't be seeing as those are families that need in-home support but don't get it.

Please do sign any petition that comes your way to support CAMHS and other children's mental health services. It's really a disgrace what is happening in this country & neither clinicians nor this country's children can continue this way much longer before the services collapse completely.

My DD was under CAMHS and I wasn't impressed, to be honest. Her therapist was always "training" so couldn't do the regular appointments. Surely, they need to train before actually seeing children? DD was seen by one of their psychiatrists, who gave her a diagnosis and said that she needed a course of specialist therapy. What she was given was NOT what was needed, despite the fact that I repeatedly asked for months about it and reminded her therapist that their own psychiatrist had ordered her to have it.

Instead, we were given utterly pointless family therapy sessions which gave us no answers or guidance on how to deal with DD's mental health (Google did help us, however). It eventually turned out that the therapists did not accept their own psychiatrist's assessment of DD's mental health and instead decided they knew best. I think that they didn't fully understand what she had been diagnosed with as they answered questions I had, which turned out to be wrong.

The therapists caused DD to have an almighty meltdown, that could have ended in her death it was that bad, and then were nowhere to be seen. They wouldn't reply to text messages or phone messages and, when they eventually did, it was to say contact the police. Bloody useless!

My DD stopped going as she felt that, although her therapist was a very nice woman, she wasn't being listened to and they had her on a course that they would finish, regardless of whether it was needed or not.

CAMHS need to start listening to parents and their patients as they have the power to help or harm the people that they see. The only thing I am left with is the (futile) hope that DD will somehow grow out of her mental health problems (I know it doesn't work like that) as they never gave me any kind of "light at the end of the tunnel".

TheDaylBroke, sorry your therapist had lots of training days (that's unusual as mostly trainees work full time within CAMHS). But as to the issue of training, how do you think people get trained? (as doctors / as midwives / as therapists / as anything really)? They do so by working for years within clinics under close supervision. How can they get 'trained' before actually working with children? Their training is exactly this, to work with children. (Obviously as I said under close supervision). And trainees usually work very hard & are enthusiastic & knowledgeable about recent theories / ideas so I wouldn't worry about that, I don't think that was the problem with your experience.

Why did you find the family therapy useless? It can be useful for many families (not for all, of course) as in most cases any given problem in one family member affects / is connected to other family members.

It's very hard to have an experience of 'not being listened to''.... I wonder what that was about. I'm sorry things were like that for you.

To the op, if your son's difficulties are affecting his handwriting to that extent, the schools can provide support in the form of word processors/iPads etc. A note taker or scribe and he could use any of these for exams also. I know this doesn't solve the other concerns or the problem itself but
May help him to keep up and reach his potential. I am not sure it would be CAMHS who would deal with this so might be worth referral to OT as someone suggested? Fwiw in this area CAMHS are rubbish - people never see the same person twice, they have been involved in a number of cases that have gone on to have serious case reviews and they don't have the resources to support anyone with ASD - but neither does anyone else in the county either so a shocking gap in resources for mental health with AsD that no-one seems to care about

dd would probably not be alive now, certainly not able to hold down a job and plan her educational future, had it not been for our local CAHMS: absolutely cannot fault them

I think it's a horrendous double act of cut funding and a lack of any actual ability to do anything.

We took my little sister. She was violent, detached, upset. She was assessed as requiring urgent help. That meant taking her in every three days, so they could ask her how she felt and get her to draw pictures. She lied her way through the family therapy sessions - said our foster parents abused her, accused our dad of rape, said she wasn't fed and had to sleep outside. She'd admit it wasn't the truth eventually but the therapist would then just "strike it out". That was all investigated, by the way, so it made everyone else's life hell.

When she was being violent and aggressive, she wouldn't come to the appointments. They gave us an "emergency" number incase something happened - but nobody ever answered. On the rare occasion that they did, they wanted to ask her what she was feeling. No practical help, when she was throwing knives at us. Social services were pretty useless, too.

Eventually they discharged us because she wasn't making progress and she wasn't a candidate for medication.

You're either so severe that they have no idea how to help, or not severe enough to need help at all.

The idea of phones not being answered or not seeing the same person twice is completely outside my own experience working for years at CAMHS and what I know about other teams. At CAMHS there is usually a duty system which answers all phone calls and deals with emergencies. Also each case is assigned to one particular person. I have no idea what on earth has happened in teams where these 2 things don't work in this way. That's unacceptable.

YANBU.
CAMHS are fucking ridiculous and leave a lot of families to suffer without support.
They need to get their act together.

In our case a child and family therapy worker said that there was nothing wrong with our son except boredom but after seeing us for months and taking copious notes and seeing things first hand he decided that when he returned from his holiday that he would refer us to the Clinical Psychologist, after several weeks I contacted CAMHS by phone and there was no record of the referral and ALL of the notes were missing from DS' file, 2 other child and family therapy workers came to the house and again took copious notes over a 5 hour period, both agreed that it was much more than boredom and did refer to CP immediately and within 6 months we had a diagnosis and ongoing support for a further period by the diagnosing CP and a second CP before being discharged.

We had further input from Camhs when things began going downhill at school but again the help and support from the child and family therapy worker was of little help except for when he attended a reintegration meeting at the school and told everyone that in his opinion mainstream education was not the right place for our son.

So mixed feelings from me, both CPs were excellent, child and family therapy workers less so.