Anyone had VIG?

[Feebeedeebee]

Wasn’t sure which section to pop this in but as this is through the Mental Health Support Team, I ended up posting here. DD (9) on waiting list for ASD assessment. In the meantime, they suggested we have VIG which is Video Interaction Guidance. They film you interacting with your child, review the footage and then meet with you to review the positive interactions. We’ve had one session. DD was obviously aware we were being filmed and didn’t behave as she usually would. Meant they had a totally false picture. Meant to be having another session tomorrow but I can’t say I’m convinced it has any benefit. Anyone have any positive experiences to share?

VIG is usually used with parents and babies/toddlers. It's unusual to be used olderf than that, so I'm curious how that referral came about?

I'd be interested to know what the evidence base for it is (with older children).

DD had been part of some group sessions at school with the MHST. She also had some 1-2-1 time with the practitioner who felt she/we would benefit from further support whilst on the waiting list for assessment. They discussed the case at a team meeting and the offer of VIG was the result. They said they’ve had positive outcomes with other families but it really seemed pointless to me. My DD has a hair trigger and is abusive towards me. But she’s also brilliant at masking so there was no chance that she was going to behave as she usually would when there was a practitioner there with a video camera. I ended up cancelling the session and will be telling them I don’t see the value in continuing. It’s not a true picture and, in fact, one of the positive interactions that they picked was one where I was smiling on the outside but was actually extremely stressed and expecting an outburst.

I had this with my daughter between 6 months and 2 years. We had to stop filming a couple of times because I was admitted into hospital for 10 weeks and another time because we had to do some therapeutic work on what parenting meant to be.

We were having vig due to me having severe depression and psychosis and struggling to bond with my daughter as a result. The way my psychosis manifested there were times when I believed my daughter wasn't real, later I believed she wasn't mine and other times she had been swapped.

Over the 18 months we had two asking questions for the filming and we did 6 filming sessions per question with reviewing the footage in between, sessions on working on how that impacts my parenting experiences.
My first asking question was does the baby like me. The therapist was very good at sitting there for a bit letting us get settled in the play session and then starting filming. We were doing it in our home too, I don't know if that had an impact on how settled we felt. When we reviewed the session she had picked out a couple of second length video clips and a couple of photos. So a really tiny part of the play session. I struggled at first with the video clips as it set off some of the psychosis like thoughts that it wasn't us on the video and had been recreated.
We took it really slowly with review sessions after the recording sessions for feedback about what I found helpful and didn't. By the time we got to the second asking questions we had found a way that we could work quite effectively and things moved a bit quicker this was after over a year.

For me it was absolutely the best thing I had for my postpartum mental illness but it was very slow, required a really good relationship between me and the therapist and we had to figure out how it could work for me and my daughter before we could make progress on the filming sessions. The first sessions I was similar I could see me masking my feelings and my experience of the clips were different to how it appeared on screen but the debrief allowed for that and by the end there were some really special interactions being identified. The filming and review without the accompanying therapy would have been a lot less effective. I'm not sure how well it would work for older more aware children