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Helping Children: Principles of Good Practice in Child Mental Health

Author(s) : Peter Fuggle, Author(s) : Peter Fonagy

Reviews and Endorsements

This accessible and engaging text is a must read for anyone with an interest in Children and Young People’s Mental Health and is full of practical advice grounded in many years of expert practice and leadership. The authors’ absolute belief in the essential role of parents and carers coupled with the explanation of how networks of care are structured will build parents’ and carers’ confidence as they navigate complex systems. Professionals from all agencies will appreciate the balanced and thoughtful demonstration of how their contribution sits within the wider system of support for those in difficulty and areas they may like to improve. It will be particularly helpful to commissioners and policy makers as they seek to improve outcomes and a truly integrated approach. By identifying key principles and weaving case studies throughout, the authors create a compelling narrative that gives hope whilst being realistic about challenges that cannot always be overcome even with our best efforts. But by giving children, young people, and those who care for them agency and input as equals into developing a choice of what, who, when and where help is provided, building system-wide collaboration and clear leadership with expert training and supervision, whilst monitoring and reflecting on outcomes with curiosity, honesty and humility, we can make a real difference.
Kathryn Pugh, MBE, Former Deputy Head of Mental Health in NHS England, Leading the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Community Transformation Programme

Following a decade of implementation of the THRIVE Framework for system change, this timely and compassionate book offers an evidence-informed approach to helping children and young people with mental health needs that recognises the importance of clinical intervention where indicated, whilst challenging the idea that therapy alone is sufficient. With clarity and warmth, it illustrates the ways in which adverse conditions amplify risks and hinder recovery, highlighting the powerful roles of families, schools and communities in supporting young people alongside professionals, attending to their life context and drawing on trusted relationships to create psychologically safe environments where children live their everyday lives. Clear, accessible and hopeful, it promotes a practical approach to supporting children and young people where mental health and wellbeing is everyone’s responsibility through a robust, collaborative and effective “helping system” to meet rising mental health need.
Dr Rachel James, Director of Clinical Services, Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust

This book is an invaluable text for anyone concerned about child and adolescent mental health, and for anyone supporting children and young people in a personal or professional capacity. Based on their extensive clinical, academic, and policy experience, and illustrated sensitively with reference to the lived experiences of families, the authors communicate their confidence in the ability of the many different people who are present in children and young people’s lives to work together to support them. By providing opportunities, empowerment and support, the clear principles provided here outline how this wider system can contribute, in complementary ways, to positive outcomes for children and young people.
Professor Cathy Creswell, University of Oxford

This book offers an excellent exploration of the concept of “Help” through the experiences of six young individuals. Using the THRIVE Framework as an organising structure, Helping Children serves as an accessible and practical guide to better understand children’s mental health and the diverse range of experiences associated with it. It emphasises the need for a varied support system around each child to effectively meet their unique needs. The book reminds us of our collective responsibility to support children's mental health by strengthening resources within the community and families. It encourages shared decision-making, involving young people in the design of support services, which promotes participation and improves effectiveness.
Rose McCarthy, Senior Organisational Consultant and National i-THRIVE Programme Lead, Tavistock Consulting

For all of us working with young people who are trying to cope with their mental health challenges, this is an important and accessible book on how to best help such young people by really listening to their stories and needs. Based upon the principle that it is not just direct work that is needed, but effective engagement and support with family and wider networks, this book will really help professionals and carers in supporting such young people and their networks.
Brian Littlechild, Professor Emeritus, University of Hertfordshire

Significant and much needed progress has been made over the past decade to radically rethink the way that child and adolescent mental health services are delivered. Despite this progress, ongoing variation in and fragmentation of delivery persists, impacting on the lives of many children and young people. This book brings together many of the foundations for developing an exciting new model for all child and adolescent mental health services—from crucial insights into how services should be configured, how they can best engage, intervene and include young people in their care, to emphasising the importance of measuring change, supporting safe care, and ensuring that all those in contact with children, young people and families have a responsibility to consider and provide for their emotional health and well-being. It brings together learning from a wide range of sources to provide a practical framework for delivering services that are responsive to, and co-constructed with, children, young people and their families, following individual young person stories throughout to eloquently illustrate the importance of adopting a new paradigm for care. Set in the context of the innovative THRIVE Framework for system change, this ambitious book is a key text to be read by practitioners, managers, commissioners, strategic decision-makers and service users alike.
Dr Paul Wallis, Director of Psychological Services – MFT CAMHS, Chief Psychological Professions Officer MFT, GM iTHRIVE/CAMHS Workforce Lead, Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

This is an important and timely book—one that invites professional experts and system organisers to engage humbly with the awkward fact that despite over a hundred years of research and development into what works for whom in the treatment of children and adolescents with mental health needs (a project both authors have long and intimate experience of), we have signally failed to create systems of help commensurate to the burdens that epidemiology shows us are prevalent across the world. Our best evidence-based treatments help only a proportion of children and young people and are insufficient to bridge the “treatment gap” by orders of magnitude. Even the evidence that strict fidelity to evidence-based models of specialist therapies offers more than marginal gains in outcomes is weak at best; meanwhile, the impact of systemic, social and cultural factors is consistently underestimated. This book invites us to consider a significant rebalancing of professional help and the role it plays alongside the necessary acknowledgement and engagement with extant helping systems that inevitably exist around all children and young people. These are the informal real-world networks that professionals can only hope to join rather than rebuild from scratch. Through well-worked case examples illustrating core principles centred on collaboration, participation, outcome measurement, safety, and whole-system approaches, this book makes a powerful argument for a more systemically rooted approach that invites professional expertise into a profoundly new relationship—less managerial and power-suffused, and more grounded in the worlds our patients inhabit. I thoroughly recommend this book to anyone embarking on a career in the helping professions, to service planners and managers, and even, dare I say it, to politicians who hold the power to direct resources for future wellbeing.
Dr Dickon Bevington MA MBBS MRCPsych PGCert, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, Medical Director, Anna Freud