What exactly are CAMHs supposed to treat?

[WhiteC0sm05]

Seems to be very little in our area.

Because staff morale is so shit and they constantly hear from parents how shit they are. That's why the service is shit

Argh. That makes me really angry actually.^^
Lots of people's work is underfunded, lots of people's morale is low, lots of people take a lot of flack from the public. It NOT an excuse to not do your job properly! I'm sorry but there are far far too many people in the public sector who mope about and whinge endlessly about how much it sucks to be them. Trust me, there's worse things to do for a living! At least helping children with mental health has a purpose! You could potentially be saving someones life, mending families. But I guess the pension is OK, eh?
Jesus. I KNOW successive governments have starved every frontline service to the bone, but at least provide the skeleton service you can, instead of saying "people are mean so I'm not gunna".

I phoned, as a professional, about a vulnerable child and a rude, bored person said 'why are you referring them? Will they even engage?' They know nothing about the child at that point.

I have also heard a mental health nurse so not untrained ask a parent if the real purpose of referral was to enhance benefits!

The condescension and judgement is truly disgusting.

The CAMHS staff in our area are often now on short term contracts and decent pensions disappeared a good while ago.

I thought that time pressures also significantly impacted service quality.
If a dc didn't turn up to see us we could go out and see them to get things going again.
CAMHS didn't have the luxury of time and weren't able to do this so did tend to drop dc if they didn't turn up for 3 sessions, easily done if dc were having a crisis.

Although I had some disagreements about what they were doing I could see that they had a significantly worse work environment to myself and that impacts the service they can provide.

If you have less training, more cases, less time for supervision, less flexibility about location due to the above, pressure to move onto working in the next case and huge waiting lists then the quality of service will be impacted.

They are shit I disclosed in a counselling session when I was 12. (I was there as I had an eating issue going on).
That I was forced to perform oral sex on a gang member from our estate at 12! .
And they done nothing.
My mum rang the police and they dealt with it. When I went back to camhs they asked me to paint a picture to relase my sadness. .
I'm nearly 27 now and okay but that could of really harmed my mental health.
It was videoed and spread around my whole school, I went to 3 different secondary schools. And finally settled in school in year 10 due to severe bullying everyone in my London borough knew me.
How I left with any GCSES I don't know.

@IfNotNowThenWhen2 that pension comment was truly dickish

Yes our case worker couldn’t be less interested or more lacking in empathy. It has been quite shocking.

White Some do use it as a get out clause, but it's not the exclusion criteria themselves that are wrong, it's that they are not implemented correctly. In this scenario parents should complain that their DC's response isn't normal. Sadly those who can navigate the system and know when to complain do get better care.

The majority of people experience normal responses to stressful life events and those who fall outside that wouldn't fit the exclusion criteria. What is considered normal should be research led. For instance, there is a normal response to grief that I imagine most would recognise and then there is an abnormal response that goes beyond the norm. The former would fall under the exclusion criteria, the latter wouldn't.

Pointless excuse for a service. I would say they made dd2 worse not better. Huge staff turnover and left to fend for yourself without support.

Very few people are going to work somewhere like CAMHS if they weren't initially drawn to help people ( there are always going to be exceptions)
Nothing is going to damage empathy and interest quicker than knowing that you aren't going to be able to offer meaningful support to a family.
To be able to function in an empathetic way most people (again not all) are going to need to have had a reasonable amount of concern showed about their work within the system they are working within.
Not being able to fill other people's bucket if your own is empty stuff.
In our area CAMHS workers weren't getting this so they had less and less to give their clients.
Burnout is high in these sorts of fields and the clearly documented issues in CAMHS would place workers at high risk of that.

So sad to hear of all these shit experiences. I didn't realise how lucky we were. Our CAHMS have been brilliant, DD was suicidal, refusing school or even to leave the house. The crisis team were coming to the house daily at one point, as an alternative to her going into inpatients. The psychiatrist has been round to the house and is confident she has autism, so felt inpatients would make her worse. As she started to improve they kept phoning, and often spent time in the late afternoon speaking on the phone with her when she got anxious. They arrange a therapy dog along to her sessions to help her relax and open up.

We doubted everything they said , but followed all the advice through and the change in my daughter is amazing. She's even managing school (specialist hospital school) again. She was prescribed medication which has really helped. Her main CAHMs worker attends all the meetings at the mainstream school and has written a letter to support our claim for DLA, which has enabled me to reduce my hours at work to support her. I'm so grateful and couldn't have paid for any better support. She's off the crisis team list, and back with the core team, and through lockdown they've kept in regular contact by writing letters ( dd won't speak on video calls) and she's trying art therapy next.

I'm horrified at the differences in services across the country. Why is it such a postcode lottery for our children to get support they need?

I hate reading threads like this as it's so disheartening. I work closely with CAMHS at the moment and I know every area is different but I can honestly say the team I work with are excellent.
The issues with funding and resources are real and there's also alot of restrictions working with young people that many people aren't aware of. In my experience the team do their best with what they have and try to deliver effective therapeutic interventions in a ridiculous short time period. There are also lots of charities that are available to help with mild to moderate mental health issues to ensure only the high risk cases get to CAMHS to try and shorten the waiting lists.

I'm sorry for you experience OP.

CAMHS is so underfunded. It's all very well clapping for the NHS, but what is really needs is funding and that means getting rid of the Tory government at the next election.

No the charities are being used to fob off parents. There is no point to them. Most desperate parents like myself have tried them long ago. We can all Google. All our caseworker did was to reel off 3 websites I’d tried long ago 2 weeks after I rang crisis at my wits end in tears.

And getting rid of crappy CAMHs. People are getting paid to reel off websites we can all find ourselves and do.

Found them complete waste of time and actually quite patronising to my child. Actually made the situation worse.

It's so sobering that everyone is having the same issues about crap service.

Why are we wasting money paying alleged professional to reel off websites? List them on a leaflet with info on the correct professional you should be looking for.

As a nurse the general feeling is no one knows what they do. We have endless children and teenagers admitted to the wards because Camhs won’t see them in a&e as it’s ‘too late’. In other words, they want to go home.

We frequently experience situations where these children sit in an acute hospital bed which is entirely inappropriate. Many often assault staff, attempt to abscond or try and break the ward furniture as well as harm themselves. We have to phone and phone camhs to try and get them seen. We often then have to wait weeks if not months for an escalation bed. Meanwhile we don’t get any training as children’s nurses to deal with these patients who are being nursed in the wrong environment. During covid we haven’t seen camhs because they have been working from home, the patients have been attending a&e as they report they have been receiving little to no support during the pandemic.

They haven’t. We’ve had zero support, they disappeared.

There does seem to be a completely unacceptable postcode lottery - even more so than with physical health. I think at the very least GPs should be able to give you a list of ideas to follow up, and that should include a clear explanation of what the different professional job titles mean. Thanks to a helpful SENCO (not the one at my DD's school), a friend of a friend and threads on here, I've been able to figure out what we probably need (and that we'll have to pay for it ourselves), but why is the info so hard to get?

It is crap that the problem ends up with schools, nurses and the police.

danni is right, I had forgotten to include the amount of allocated time CAMHS workers get to work with a dc often only 10 sessions.
We used to say it took up to six before some dc felt safe enough to start the work and we could be working with them for over a year.

If you aren't paying for decent services you aren't going to get them, it really is that simple.

No it isn’t that simple. The level of crapness is not just down to funding. Other departments are underfunded and aren’t crap.

Most long term chronically underfunded services are crap.
Those which rely on a therapeutically enabled staff need decent funding to provide decent services, therapy isn't going to work as effectively if the therapist isn't supported themselves.
Many agencies can manage short term dips in funding but chronic long term underfunding will produce a poor service.
See child protection services, CAMHS, DWP, housing departments.
It is a tragedy that child mental health gets so little support but it isn't the people who work in it that set the budgets.

That's true it awful op (and other pp who have been let down). I agree with Hack that it's not good enough for the public sector to be rubbish due to morale!

I am public sector and used to work for the immigration service. Try having people spit and hit you, tell you they wish your kids would die, threaten to turn up at your home etc because you won't grant entry or the status they want. That behaviour day after day doesn't do great things for morale either. I still managed to be professional and do the job I was paid for!