Helping young people in crisis: gender identity, personality problems, and complex trauma.

The Jack Tizard Memorial Lecture and National Conference returns with a focus on vulnerability and resilience.

About the speakers

Self-harm in children and adolescents: a major health and social problem of our time

Keith is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University; Consultant Psychiatrist with Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust. For more than 40 years he and his research group have been conducting investigations concerning the causes, treatment, prevention and outcome of suicidal behaviour. He has published more than 500 papers and chapters and 15 books. He has received the following awards: Stengel Research Award from the International Association for Suicide Prevention; Dublin Career Research Award from the American Association of Suicidology; Research Award of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; Life Achievement Award presented at the European Symposium of Suicide & Suicidal Behaviour in Israel; Morselli Medal from the International Association of Suicide Research; Finnish Psychiatric Association Medal. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. Professor Hawton has a particular interest in epidemiology and clinical management of self-harm, suicide and self-harm in adolescents, media influences on self-harm and evaluation of suicide prevention initiatives.

Key Learning Points

• Nature and development of self-harm in young people
• Factors that contribute to the problem
• How young people and their families can be helped

The impact of adverse childhood experiences: Challenges ahead

Listen to Andrea’s podcast with ACAMH on Trauma.

Andrea is Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. He is also Honorary Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at the National and Specialist CAMHS Clinic for Trauma, Anxiety, and Depression at the South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.

Key Learning Points

• to appreciate the differences between prospective vs retrospective measures of childhood adversity
• to recognise the importance of pre-existing vulnerabilities (selection effects) in the long term associations between childhood adversity and health outcomes
• to acknowledge the need for new computational methods to inform individualised health risk prediction after childhood adversity

Working with at-risk adolescents

Troy is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Head of Adolescent At-risk & Forensic Service, Head of Psychology and Psychotherapy for Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services, South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust

Key Learning Points

• Understanding the wide range of presentations seen in an ‘At-risk’ service, including emerging borderline personality disorder, complex trauma, young offenders and transgender youth
• Understanding the different intervention pathways for these different but often overlapping groups
• Understanding the possible outcomes for these complex client groups.

How neuroscience is helping to motivate a preventative psychiatry approach: Latent vulnerability and the impact of childhood maltreatment

Eamon is Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology, UCL. His research focuses on early adversity and behavioural problems in childhood and he is particularly interested in studying affective processing and potential neural markers of resilience in the context of childhood maltreatment.

Key Learning Points

• Understanding how childhood maltreatment alters brain function
• Understanding the concept of Latent Vulnerability: How such changes in brain function may be adaptive in the short term, but have long term costs
• Understanding the importance of social functioning as a pathway to mental health vulnerability

Hope for Children and Families Intervention Resources – Working with Complex and Multiple Problems

We recently interviewed Arnon about his work, you can listen to the podcast or watch the filmed interview.

Arnon is a Child and Family Psychiatrist, who with his wife Marianne, a Social work Consultant, Individual and Family Therapist founded the Child and Family Practice. With colleagues they established the Child Care Consultation Service, and the Child Abuse Service at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital and continued to provide assessments and consultations for the courts in complex child care cases. With colleagues Arnon established Child and Family Training to develop and train evidence-based approaches to assessment, analysis and intervention.

• Builds on the MATCH-ADTC paradigm -the Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma and Conduct Problems, and the MAP Managing and Adapting Practice which focuses on a wide diversity of treatment targets and ages
• Integrates Common treatment elements and procedures from across the field of effective interventions into a co-ordinated framework
• Transforms the work of practioners from health, social care and education to meet the diverse complex, multiple mental health needs of children, young people and their families

Ethical issues arising in the provision of medical interventions for gender diverse children and adolescents

Bernadette is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Gender Identity Development Service, The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. Bernadette used to work at Great Ormond Street Hospital with young people with serious problems around eating, and supported sick children and their families on the cardiac and renal units.

• Understanding that the care of gender diverse children and adolescents raises a number of questions that are as much ethical as medical or psychological, arising in new social territory at the interaction of emancipatory ideas about autonomy for sex/gender minorities, respect for the wishes of children and young people, and technological change.
• Gaining an appreciation of the kind of factual knowledge and scholarship that serve as an important context for moral thought and action, but understanding that an appeal to existing scholarship will not in itself settle the issue about when and whether to intervene in the lives and bodies of these children and young people.
• Understanding that ethical practice in such a service cannot be reduced to a single event – a treatment decision aimed at achieving the ethically ‘right’ outcome – but is to be found in the extended processes of assessment, exploration and the negotiation of consent within the UK medico-legal framework