Dr. Joseph Duffy:

We would very much welcome that. It is important to note so that people are aware of it that CAMHS is a specialist service. We are talking about young people who are within a CAMHS service and if they need to receive continued support, that is very important because the mental health problems they are showing and for which they need support are at the more severe end. If the age limit is moved, and it would be excellent if it was, it will involve a significant amount of retraining, particularly for psychiatrists because the other mental health professionals are trained across the lifespan. That is why it works well within Jigsaw.

Within the primary care setting and within Jigsaw we have the 12 to 25 age group. When we align that with CAMHS I believe we will see much better value for money and greater satisfaction for young people but also specialist focused care for those young people who most need it. As has been said, we know that 75% of mental health problems occur for young people before the age of 18. That is, therefore, a critical time to support them. For the committee, it should continue to apply political pressure to ensure this is implemented in a timely way.

One of the things that has concerned me over the past 18 months, during which there has been considerable and appropriate focus on CAMHS, is that CAMHS has become synonymous with youth mental health. We need to move the lens back out and to ask what we are looking at in respect of the whole system. Are we looking upstream at early intervention and prevention and can we then think about supporting those areas before young people end up in CAMHS? When we speak to CAMHS colleagues they say they are overwhelmed. There is a general feeling now that parents are becoming greatly dissatisfied when they are told their child is not suitable for CAMHS. They see that as something of a disappointment or as their expectations not being met. In many ways, however, their child's presenting issues are not actually suitable for CAMHS and they need support much earlier on. The difficulty is that we know that pre-pandemic the Holy Grail on psychotherapy was a one-to-one individual session. It is now seen that CAMHS is the Holy Grail and everybody must go to CAMHS. I am appealing for a broader conversation and to pull the lens back out a bit to say there are lots of supports available and CAMHS is only for some people.