I work
right on the interface between these two entitles, and what I see is a mental health system that has been not just brought to its knees, but kept there, indefinitely, for as long as I have had anything to do with mental health (which, at 30 years and counting, is far too fucking long).
Most of the people I meet in the field, both in my own field of counselling, and amongst my counterparts in the mainstream mental health services, are fabulous, wonderful, committed, lovely people who got into it because they cared. The tragedy of the situation is that these people are forced into a system that has, by virtue of its acute shortage of resources, to try to find reasons why
not to treat people, rather than focus on how they could. And that's damaging and dangerous, both for the people involved, and for the potential patients.
Under the umbrella of the organisation I work for, we have an eating disorder service. We try, within the constraints of our funding, to operate a system which doesn't have the institutional cliff edges of S-CAMHS (the NHS eating disorder service) - we don't boot our clients out on their 18th birthday, to a notional - but functionally non-existent - adult eating disorder service, nor do we operate the rigid BMI criteria applicable in NHS offerings. Because life isn't like that - people don't stop having eating disorders when they hit 18, or because they've got their BMI above 17. And nobody working in specialist CAMHS thinks so, either - but they're bound by a system which forces them to justify dropping clients - many still in need - because it's beyond their control.
CAMHS needs funding commensurate with the demands placed on it. You don't reduce demand by reducing funding, and there is a LOT of need out there. There was a lot before Covid - but I think there has been a step jump in need through the lockdowns (and we're seeing that coming through in spades in our adult general counselling service). The platitudes of Government, and the desperate attempts to square the circle at the coalface are no longer going to mix metaphors, or paper over the cracks.
If ever there was a service that needed money throwing at it, it's CAMHS. Novel though it may seem, investing in child mental health IS an investment, because if you can address problems at that stage, you can deal with stuff which both becomes harder to treat as time goes on, but also results in significant additional costs to society - the price we pay for mental health-driven crime, damage, violence, policing is a lot higher than I think we realise, and a lot of that could be addressed by providing proactive, pre-emptive resources aimed at improving mental health wellbeing in the young. It'd pay dividends, and I'd go so far as to say that no amount of money spent on that would be excessive.
ETA: this flowed rather freely, on account of the fact that I have a meeting on Tuesday with a Rather Senior Person in NHS Wales to try and secure some funding for our ED service, and I have been, ahahaha, rehearsing my arguments
