Young mental health cases rise by more than 10% during pandemic

Thursday 08 October 2020

The number of children needing mental health care has risen by 11% since the start of the pandemic.

In January, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAHMS) had 672 cases, but this has now risen to 747.

The average waiting time from being referred to treatment, which was 11 weeks before the pandemic, has increased to 13 weeks.

Reasons for this increase include some vulnerable families and staff needing to shield for health purposes, and some assessments and treatments not being able to be undertaken during lockdown as they require a face-to-face response.

In order to tackle this backlog, the Treasury Minister recently gave an extra £536,000 to the department for Children, Young People, Education and Skills to be spent this year.

The money will be spent on recruiting staff to run extra clinics and put on additional interventions for those children and young people on the CAMHS waiting list or for those awaiting reviews. Most of those of recruits, however, will be existing staff working extra hours or bank nurses coming in to quickly fill posts.

Pictured: Some of the £536,000 from the Treasury will be used to fund a therapeutic primary school art project.

It will also fund the recruitment of a mental health practitioner, who will sit within the Children and Families hub to answer concerns and queries from parents, carers and professionals during working hours, a therapeutic primary school art project, and training and support for frontline staff so they can better support children and young people with emotional wellbeing and mental health need and their parents and carers.

A spokesperson for Children, Young People, Education and Skills (CYPES) said: “CAMHS has long been a very busy service, however, the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic have resulted in the number and complexity of referred to the service to increase, which has in turn led to the average waiting time from referral to treatment to also rise.

“Last year, Ministers made children their number one priority in the Government Plan and they also pledged to improve access to mental health. That is why £536,000 has now been allocated from the General Reserve to CYPES to help support young people wellbeing in the aftermath of the covid outbreak.”

CAMHS is a mental health assessment and therapeutic service for children and young people up to the age of 18 and their families based at Liberté House in La Motte Street. It offers assessment, diagnosis and treatment for children and young people suffering from emotional, behavioural, relationship and developmental difficulties, as well as other mental health disorders, such as psychosis and eating disorders.