Julia Faulconbridge - Improving the Psychological Wellbeing of Children and Young People: Effective Prevention and Early Intervention Across Health, Education and Social Care

Improving the
Psychological Wellbeing of
Children and Young People

Effective Prevention and Early Intervention
Across Health, Education and Social Care

Edited by JULIA FAULCONBRIDGE,
KATIE HUNT AND AMANDA LAFFAN

Foreword by Sarah Brennan

Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia

Contents

Tables and figures

Foreword

The authors here have achieved a scope and breadth in this book that is to be applauded. It is both ground breaking and refreshing. The book brings together research and practice to positively construct a comprehensive vision for children and young peoples mental health and psychological wellbeing by placing it clearly within the framework of family, community and the social and economic factors that affect them. The authors have taken the research and applied it to their own experience and practice to create a very practical and thorough exploration of how we can create a society which truly grows psychologically healthy and resilient children, young people and thus adults in future.

Importantly they define frequently used terms which, too often, mean different things to different people. So misunderstandings are clarified; confusion is brushed away. Thus concepts like resilience, ecological, holistic, systems approach are defined and then the evidence is explored to appreciate how they may help in the creation of a new mind set and approach where everyone knows what their crucial contribution is.

Locating mental health clearly within the ecological system of healthy development from before birth enables us to think and plan about mental health in its literal sense of health, rather than the assumption of illness. Health promotion is widely accepted in physical health but is still nascent in mental health.

There is no doubt that embedding the development and management of our mental health and psychological wellbeing into the way society operates is a huge challenge thats why this book is brilliant. For the first time, we have here some ideas and practical examples of how we might achieve this. Treatment is part of the holistic approach, but again the authors place treatment within the ecology of the system around the child, and argue convincingly that by understanding and working in this way we will properly begin to address the mental health issues of our young people today.

By recognising that we all have a responsibility to understand better how to support the healthy development of psychological wellbeing of our children, and how we support those most directly involved like parents and families we will address the crisis we are currently facing for children and young people.

Providing practice examples makes this a very readable book that anyone can relate to, and enables the reader to see how the research and ideas can play out in practice.

From my work at YoungMinds, I know only too well how those people around a child or young person in mental distress most often feel guilty and desperate whether they are parents, other family members, teachers, friends and they dont know what to do to help. They too need to be able to understand and be supported. So, here there is an opportunity to understand better. Each aspect of the ecological system is explored in detail, along with the inter-relationships and practice examples to give us encouragement and a path for future improvement.

Sarah Brennan
Freelance consultant and former
Chief Executive of Young Minds Trust

About this book

This book aims to stimulate debate about what it would mean to have a model of child services that truly pays attention to helping the next generation to grow up to have greater psychological wellbeing and be more resilient, rather than directing the majority of resources to trying to help after things have gone wrong. We are not just looking to prevent mental health problems, but at what would promote positive child development. It is not a handbook on child rearing but about the necessary conditions in our society that would enable more families to be able to care well for their children. Following a broad introduction to the field, there are a set of chapters looking at the research and practice-based evidence for primary prevention, mental health promotion and early intervention across all the key areas of work with children, young people and families. All the chapters include case histories and a wealth of practical information. The final chapter lays out some principles for the development of holistic, integrated and effective models of child services.

Note on language

There is debate around how best to describe some of the experiences discussed in this book. The use of diagnostic and medical language is often considered problematic in psychological services, and we have tried to use non-medical language in as much of this publication as possible. There are some instances, however, when we have used medical language (such as when discussing other published work which has used a medical framework). Using these terms does not mean that we support medical explanations of mental health difficulties in children and young people. For further information, please see:

British Psychological Society (BPS), Division of Clinical Psychology (2013) Classification of Behaviour and Experience in Relation to Functional Psychiatric Diagnoses: Time for a Paradigm Shift . Leicester: BPS.

British Psychological Society (BPS), Division of Clinical Psychology (2015) Guidelines on Language in Relation to Functional Psychiatric Diagnosis . Leicester: BPS.

Chapter 1

Risk factors, protective
factors and resilience

How we can nurture psychological
wellbeing in children and young people

JULIA FAULCONBRIDGE, KATIE HUNT, AMANDA LAFFAN,
IYABO FATIMILEHIN AND DUNCAN LAW

We have learned a great deal, over recent decades, about what is harmful to the psychological wellbeing of children and young people, and have a better understanding of what affects their mental and physical health. We are also learning more about the positive factors which enable children to grow up well, to cope and sometimes even flourish, despite significant adversity. The challenge is to use this knowledge to develop ways to both prevent children from suffering serious harm and harness the protective factors that contribute to resilience. There are positive examples of such interventions, based on the research evidence and with proven efficacy, but this field of applied psychological intervention remains underdeveloped and is fertile ground for new approaches.

In this chapter, we endeavour to look at child mental health and psychological wellbeing from the opposite perspective to that often employed. Rather than focus on what to do when serious problems arise, we will consider what we can do, as a society, to raise children to be psychologically healthy and resilient people, able to enjoy productive lives and manage the difficulties and challenges which will inevitably occur.

Prevalence of mental health problems in children and young people

There are many difficulties in assessing the levels of psychological distress in children and young people. Large-scale population studies are expensive and inevitably broad brush in their approach, lacking detail at the level of the individual. More focused approaches tend to be snapshots in time and lose the insights gained from longitudinal studies of the same children over time. The majority also use psychiatric diagnostic criteria to identify subjects, thus missing large numbers of children whose difficulties do not fit a label (see Hagel and Maughan 2017).