(UK) Thousands of Scottish children denied mental health services

July 8, 2018, Scotsman: Insight: Young lives ruined as pleas for mental health treatment rejected https://www.scotsman.com/news/health/insight-young-lives-ruined-as-pleas-for-mental-health-treatment-rejected-1-4765666 …Throughout the time Joseph lived with Marianne and her husband, her approaches to CAMHS were rebuffed; at one stage, an appointment was made and then cancelled after they were offered help by Barnardo’s, which then fell through. Joseph’s outbursts escalated and one day, just under a year ago, after he had lashed out and split her husband’s lip, the fostering agency said enough was enough. “They knew I would never call it, so they called it for me,” says Marianne. … ... Five years after his need for a psychological intervention was first identified, Marianne says, Joseph has still not been accessed by CAMHS. [Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service] Joseph is just one of thousands of children in Scotland whose referrals to the specialist service are rejected every year. In the past few weeks, two separate reports – one from Barnardo’s and one from the Scottish Association for Mental Health (SAMH) – have confirmed what users already knew: that CAMHS is failing many of those it is supposed to serve. … …and a sense that young people have to be suicidal before they are taken seriously. Most critics accept CAMHS workers are doing their best in a system buckling under the weight of demand, but what it means in human terms is many parents being forced to look on helplessly as their children’s mental health problems intensify. … To try to get a handle on the issue, I spoke to parents from across the country and the social spectrum who have experienced difficulties with the existing system; all of them were miserable and worn out, with some harbouring feelings of guilt after their own parenting skills were called into question. … Another mother, Jennifer, believes she made life difficult for herself because when her son Patrick was first referred to CAMHS with suspected autism in Primary 7, she was still in denial. A specialist spent time with them both, but seemed happy to accept her view that he was not on the spectrum. Later, as Patrick’s problems became more pronounced, and Jennifer began to accept that he may indeed have ASD, she could not get herself back into the system in order to obtain a diagnosis. By then, the social work department were involved. Despite the fact she has a younger daughter with no behavioural problems and had already completed a parenting class, she found her own abilities being called into question. “That sent my husband and me into the doldrums. We came to believe we must be terrible parents so we said: ‘Social Work, come and tell us what we are doing wrong.’ The idea that it was my fault set me back because it stopped me exploring other avenues.” Jennifer says she quickly learned saying “No” to anything meant a black mark against her name, so she agreed to attend a class for parents of “difficult” children. Having heard what she was dealing with, one of the facilitators took her aside and said he was sure there was something else going on. He built her confidence back up and gave her the details for the Scottish Centre for Autism, which has agreed to assess Patrick, now 12, independently. “We have had the most extreme physical violence in our house,” says Jennifer. “We have had the police at our door two or three times, and at the centre of it all is an extremely upset, confused wee boy who can’t understand what is going on. “The SAMH audit of CAMHS was commissioned as part of the Scottish Government’s mental health strategy, against a backdrop of concern about the growing pressures on the service. Statistics show the number of referrals to CAMHS has grown by 20 per cent over the past three years, with 33,309 in 2017. The Scottish government has a waiting time target of 18 weeks, so the number of rejected referrals is also rising (to 7,266 in 2017); however the proportion of rejected referrals, one in five, while high, has remained stable since 2016. … Having interviewed 363 people in seven health board areas, SAMH found most young people referred to CAMHS had tried to access help elsewhere first and so had their hopes pinned on being accepted for treatment. … Finlay was already being treated for epilepsy at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh when she began to suspect he might also be suffering from ADHD. “I was told the waiting list for a CAMHS diagnosis was 13 months, but I couldn’t wait that long – he was in P2 and his schooling was suffering,”she says. …