What we offer

We aim to provide great care to every child and young person and to support to their parents and carers and family. We work with children from the age of five years up to their 18^th birthday. For young people, who require mental health support beyond the age of 18, we have transition workers to support as they move across to the most appropriate adult services.

Our job is to promote emotional wellbeing and provide treatment to children and young people with a range of mental health needs. By putting patient experience at the heart of everything we do, we can ensure that we are providing the very best quality services, advice, information and support to those people who need it, when they need it. Across CAMHS we work alongside our service users to develop services. We have service user groups and events and aim to include young people on interview panels and in service planning (contact dina.bokrezion@swlstg.nhs.uk if you would like to join our Service User groups).

The CAMHS community teams offer a range of assessments and treatments for children and young people presenting with enduring and moderate to severe mental health needs which impact significantly on daily functioning. Our community CAMHS teams are made up of a range of mental health professionals including Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, Clinical and Counselling Psychologists, Family Therapists, Clinical Nurse Specialists and Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists.

We have community services in five locations across south west London. They provide assessment and treatment for a range of common problems. There is one in each of the five boroughs covered by the Trust.

CAMHS offer a range of interventions and psychological therapies that research indicates can be effective in treating common mental health needs. These include:

• Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is a type of talking therapy used to help you understand how you think about things and to change any behaviours that aren't helping you. It is normally very practical, and your therapist may ask you to put into practice what you discuss between your sessions.
• Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is similar to CBT in that it is about helping you understand your feelings and change unhelpful behaviour, but it also helps you learn to accept yourself. DBT is usually a longer treatment than CBT and often involves working with groups. The focus is to identify unhelpful behaviours, understand why you might have developed them, and learn new coping strategies that are more helpful in the long term.
• Family therapy is one of the treatment options in CAMHS which involves your family coming to sessions in CAMHS with you. During family therapy sessions everyone works together to find ways for the whole family to do things differently, and there is an emphasis on drawing on the family's strengths and the different perspectives of family members.
• Interpersonal Therapy for Adolescents (IPT-A) is a 12 session therapy model focussing on helping you address problems in your relationships with important people in your life. The theory behind IPT is that having poor relationships in your life can cause you to feel depressed, and that feeling depressed can also impact upon your relationships! Working on your symptoms of depression and improving your relationships will therefore improve how you feel. In IPT-A, working together with your therapist you will identify when your depression began and the link to relationships (e.g. transitions, bereavement, interpersonal difficulties or conflict) and create improvements.
• Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy is a treatment that focuses on a child's emotional responses and behaviour whilst naming feelings and carefully attending to what a young person says. This therapeutic process can help children and young people who are feeling troubled by anxiety or other complex feelings such as aggression, sadness, anxiety and depression.
• Trauma focused interventions for young people who have experienced one or more traumatic events, including Trauma Focused CBT, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) or more specialist trauma approaches for Children and Young people who have experienced developmental trauma. 

We also offer consultation and training to other professionals or services in some of our Boroughs in South West London including teams who require specialist mental health input, such as Social Care teams or Youth Offending Services.