What Can be Learnt From a Pilot Project Offering Brief Therapeutic Work to Parents and Infants in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service?

Can a method of working therapeutically with parents and children (under the age of five) be made use of in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health team, in which this kind of work does not regularly take place? I hope to understand whether this model of work can be helpful to the children and their families and to look at how this method was received by the team.

It is hoped that by working with the parents and child together, the families will be able to think about both the child's presenting difficulty, but also the relationship between the parents and their child and how the parents' own experiences and difficulties might impact on the present situation.

The primary aim of this research is to trial an under-fives' service, in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) team which has not offered this kind of work specifically before. The project would involve recruiting families, with children under the age of five years old, who are experiencing one or more difficulties, and these families would be offered five sessions, with the option of an additional five sessions, should this be required.

The work will broadly follow the Tavistock's model of parent-infant psychotherapy and the sessions will be centred within a psychodynamic psychotherapeutic framework. I hope that this trial will enable to me to learn more about this model of work, in terms of the processes involves and the themes that emerge. I hope to see how possible it is for this kind of work to be adopted within a generic CAMHS team, and how it is received by the families involved.

Due to this method of working being new to the team, it will be interesting to see how my colleagues respond to the model. It is likely that trying to gather full qualitative or quantitative data in this area would be beyond the scope of this piece of research, but I hope to make some reflections on how the model was received by the team. I hope to present the plan of work to the team prior to the treatment stage, and then share some of the findings from the research, after treatment. I also hope to conduct some form of consultation, with a staff group, following the treatment stage, in order to hear about their experiences of this method.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

* The participants in this trial were children under the age of five years old, who had been referred to the CAMHS clinic.
* The child could have been experiencing a range of difficulties, including issues with sleeping, feeding or attachment, which were having an impact on their, or their families, functioning and wellbeing.
* The work involved working with the referred child and their parent(s) or carers

Exclusion Criteria:

* Families involved in court proceedings
* Families where there were safeguarding concerns
* Families currently experiencing domestic violence
* Families for whom severe parental mental health difficulties were indicated at the point of referral.
* Families who were already been accessing mental health support
* If the child had severe developmental difficulties and would require a specialist service
* Families requiring an interpreter in order to participate, I would have been unable to involve them, owing to the level of complexity this would have added in terms of the communication.