A professional who offers sessions with talking and art materials to help you express and explore your feelings. Art therapy may help you find out more about yourself, which can lead to positive changes.

An assessment is a meeting with CAMHS to listen to you so they can make a diagnosis and make joint decisions with you to decide the best way to help you.. This is called an assessment. Family members should be involved in assessments, unless the person who is unwell says he or she does not want that.

After the assessment meeting, CAMHS draw up a care plan with someone when they first start offering them support based on someone’s needs are and what is the best package of help they can offer. This will be made jointly with young people and their families.

Behaviour that puts the safety of the person or other people at risk, or that has a significant impact on the person’s or other people’s quality of life.

CBT stands for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is a talking therapy that can help you manage your difficulties by changing the way you think and behave. Talking and changing your behaviour can change how you think (cognitive) and what you do (behaviour).

A Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist is a doctor who is specially trained to work with children and young people with mental health problems. They identify the problem and may prescribe medicines for you if necessary.

A clinic simply describes the building where a CAMHS appointment or session would usually take place.

A health professional who is directly involved in the care and treatment of people. Examples include nurses, doctors, and therapists.

When you visit your doctor (general practitioner; GP) about a physical health problem, they talk to you about your symptoms, how long you have had them and the effect this has on your life. This helps them to diagnose what problem you have and to decide what treatment will be best for you.

In the same way, the people at CAMHS talk to young people and their families in order to better understand their problems , and to discuss with them how best to help. They may provide you with a diagnosis, which describes a group of symptoms or problems that often occur together. However, it is important to remember that not everyone’s problems fit neatly into one diagnosis or another.

Young people have lots of different thoughts about diagnosis. Here are some of the things they‘ve said:

  •  I don’t like being labelled.
  •  It’s helpful to have a name for what’s been going on for me.
  •  I don’t just want to be known by my diagnosis.
  •  It made me think, “Whoa! I must be really sick. This is serious and scary.”
  •  Knowing what was wrong with me meant I could research more about it and knew where to look for advice on how to manage.
  •  Will it follow me forever and affect my future?
  •  It’s nice to know I wasn’t imagining it and there was something wrong.

If you’ve got any questions or concerns about diagnosis, please talk about this with your CAMHS worker.

Taking into consideration as much about a person as possible in the treatment of an illness – this includes their physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual, and social needs.

Services where the service user is accommodated on a ward and receives treatment there from specialist health professionals.

Intervention is another word for treatment. It means that you and the staff at CAMHS are working together to help you manage your difficulties. Intervention can look different for different people based on your individual need and situation.  Intervening is like standing in the way of something and stopping it going any further.

Someone’s ability to manage and cope with the stress and challenges of life, and to manage any diagnosed mental health problems as part of leading their normal everyday life.

Mental health is about the way we think and feel. It can also be called ‘emotional wellbeing’. Our mental health can go up and down and change in the same way our physical health can. Just because someone has experienced a mental health problem at some stage in their life, it doesn’t mean they will always have this problem.

A mental health problem can happen to anyone, whatever their age, ethnicity, religion or IQ. Sometimes problems can develop when someone experiences something traumatic; like the death of someone close or bullying or abuse or a stressful family life. Sometimes problems appear out of the blue. It’s not the person’s fault and it’s nothing for them to be ashamed about.

There are lots of celebrities who have spoken publicly about having mental health problems including Demi Lovato, Frankie from The Saturdays, Johnny Wilkinson, Stephen Fry, Catherine Zeta Jones, Lady Gaga, Tom from McFly, Johnny Depp, David Beckham, Russell Brand and JK Rowling.

There is still a lot of misunderstanding about mental health, with newspapers and television often wrongly portraying people with mental health problems negatively. Fortunately, this type of stigma is being addressed by high profile campaigns such as Time to Change.

People may have different ideas and cultural beliefs about mental health. CAMHS respects this and will always try to work with and your family.

What is a mental health problem?

A mental health problem is when difficulties in the way we think and feel can mean that we find it hard to cope with family life, relationships, school or the wider world. Problems can range from everyday worries or stresses which are difficult but can be managed, to more serious problems.
 

A team made up of a range of both health and social care workers combining their skills to help people.

Psychotherapists are professionals who offer treatments based on unravelling background causes of difficulties and making links from this to your current feelings.

This is the process of someone you know contacting CAMHS as they are worried about you and would like you to meet with our team for some support.

This is someone who uses health services. Some people use the terms patient or client instead.

Sometimes we may suggest different services who can give you the types of help that suits you best. This may be suggested alongside working with us or in place of us.