Minister’s Maudsley visit marks £32m boost for young mental health

Care Services Minister Paul Burstow visted the Maudsley Hospital (25 October) as the Government announced £32 million for psychological therapies for children and young people with mental health problems.

The Minister spent his morning at the Michael Rutter Centre, part of South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), which is world renowned for the services it provides to children and young people with mental health problems.

Paul Burstow said: "Half of those with mental health problems first experience symptoms by the age of 14, and three quarters before their mid-20s. This pioneering work will focus on early and effective treatment."

He spoke to staff and young people from South London who have first hand experience of the psychological therapies, including talking therapies (1), that the Government hope to encourage through their funding.

Psychological therapies have successfully helped adults with mental health problems. SLaM has been at the forefront of developing and delivering similar services for children and young people. The £32 million investment will go towards the development of psychological therapies tailored to meet the needs of children and young people (2).

DISCOVER Adolescent Wellbeing Workshops are just one example of a SLaM approach that incorporates psychological therapies. The workshops are delivered in community venues in Southwark in partnership with teachers and tutors. They use a new step by step group Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) (3) programme  to treat 16 to18 year olds with anxiety and low mood.

The model has been adapted by the DISCOVER research team from evidence based adult wellbeing workshops. To help make the approach 'teen friendly' and non-stigmatising, a teenage advisory group worked with SLaM to design the workshop approach and materials.

The minister met Stella Adeniran, a teenage psychology student (18 years) who was on the DISCOVER advisory group. Stella said: "We acted as advisors to create the project. It's aimed at 16 to 18 year olds so it was a good idea to involve us. We gave advice on logos, the language used and the videos. I thought it was really, really good. We had a run through of it and it was fantastic."

Other Borough based projects include Lambeth's Triple P (Positive Parenting Programme) offered to the parents of children with disabilities to help teach parents behavioural management techniques and coping strategies.  This, evidence based parenting programme has been a great success in the past and continues to grow in popularity, with an increase in the number of parents who complete the course. Feedback has been excellent.  Similar techniques and skills have been transferred and used when teaching staff and carers of children with disabilities.

The Social Detectives Group is an eight week group programme for children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who experience high levels of social anxiety affecting their accessing a range of community and school based activities. It uses ideas from cognitive behavioural therapy, to help children to manage anxiety in social situations and equip parents with strategies to support their children in practicing these techniques.

In the New Year there are plans to run the first UK Secret Agent Society Programme for families. This is an innovative, evidence based social skills intervention that uses games and activities to improve the emotional understanding and social skills of 8-12 year olds with high functioning ASDs).

Paul Burstow said: "We know psychological therapies work. Our aim is to transform existing mental health services for children so our children get the best treatment possible, from services that are more responsive to their needs."

Other projects the Minister looked at included:
•    CBT and emotional early intervention and screening project - CUES (Coping with Unusual Experiences Study). This assesses the effectiveness of a new cognitive behavioural therapy designed to reduce distress and improve coping for children who have had unusual experiences and distress. This takes place within Tier 2 CAMHS, with significant service user and family involvement throughout the design and development stages of the trial.

•    CBT Anxiety and Depression Disorder Clinics
These provide a service to children and young people with moderate to severe emotional difficulties impacting substantially on their day-to-day functioning and psychosocial development.  The clinics provide CBT and other evidence-based psychological therapies and medication if indicated.  They conduct treatment development and outcome trials and provide training including in the new CYP-IAPT initiative.

•    Empowering Patients, Empowering Communities / Helping Families project (EPEC). This is an innovative, low cost method for working with socially disadvantaged communities to ensure that they get effective, evidence based early parenting intervention.  It recruits, trains and support local parents from socially disadvantaged areas to run parenting groups in their communities. The parent peer facilitators learn to use a step-by-step programme called Being A Parent (Penney et al., 2009).  Evaluation research shows this training increases parenting and groupwork skills, knowledge and confidence of our peer facilitators (Day et al, 2010).

•   eMPOWERMENT - piloting patient held electronic records (including session by session outcome monitoring) A world first in mental health, the eMPOWERMENT programme will be introducing electronic personal health records, known as MyHealthBox, in early 2012. MyHealthBox aims to offer young people and their families greater targeted information about their health and well-being. This provides key clinical information including care plans, and the opportunity for young people to directly feed back outcomes information into the Trust-held medical record system.

•   The Carelink screening project carried out a social-emotional screen for all children aged 0 to 5 who become looked after by Southwark Children's Services in order to identify early social and emotional difficulties and to formulate appropriate interventions for those with specific needs. It aims to improve collaboration among professionals in a position to positively influence the social and emotional health of this group, which would involve joint working with Children's Services to improve the access of this high risk group of children to CAMHS.

Ends

For more information contact the Communications team on 020 3228 2112 or communications@slam.nhs.uk.

1. Talking Therapies: Talking therapies involve talking to someone who is trained to help you deal with your negative feelings. They can help anyone who is experiencing distress. Talking therapies include Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and counselling.

2. SLaM involved in pilot: The first phase of the project will invest in three collaboratives - SLaM's Children and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), covering Lambeth & Southwark, has linked up with University College London (UCL) and King's College London (KCL) in one such collaborative, which also extends to Greenwich, Wandsworth, Westminster, Haringey, Cambridge, Hertfordshire, and Sussex.

The other two collaboratives are:
• Salford Cognitive Therapy Training Centre at Greater Manchester West NHS Mental Health Foundation Trust as the HEI covering North Pennine, South Pennine, Manchester & Salford, Derby and Barnsley.

• Reading as the HEI covering Oxford, Swindon, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Wiltshire, Bath & NE Somerset, Bournemouth, Dorset, Poole and Gloucestershire.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT): CBT is a type of psychotherapy that aims to retrain the way a person thinks to help that person deal with stressful situations. CBT is based on the idea that it is necessary to change both thinking (cognition) and behaviour at the same time.

3. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT): CBT is a type of psychotherapy that aims to retrain the way a person thinks to help that person deal with stressful situations. CBT is based on the idea that it is necessary to change both thinking (cognition) and behaviour at the same time.