Description

Part of a 6-year revision of Tier 4

Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS)in the UK.

There is a saying in CAMHSville: If you want to know why I do what I do, then come and “try living here”. This slogan is a metaphorical nod towards psychotherapy and other empathic tactics relieving the distress of young people residing in Tier 4 adolescent units. Places where aspiring professionals hone their skills through hours of supervision, years of expensive training and lifetimes of personal suffrage. So if contemporary psychotherapy really was a place, then CAMHSville is the perfect town scape for its monolithic monuments to famous practitioners and dark enough alleys for their unscrupulous snake oil peddling. It’s a place resentful of speculative and emergent counselling industries caught in a moment of chronological uncertainty, especially for the learners who are encouraged to look backwards instead of forwards. Such a claim would suggest that if CAMHSville didn’t already exist, it would be the sort of place we’d just have to invent.

About the Author

Dr Dean-David Holyoake has spent 100 years of his life devoted to the pursuit of nursing and researching in CAMHS (UK) and Europe and will probably continue to do so until his mother tells him to ‘stop mucking about!’ He lives in Dudley most of the time but plays in Birmingham. He is the author of many books and articles about CAMHS and solution focused living. This book is part of a series of 3 research ethnographies exploring CAMHS issues. So be sure to check out the others on Amazon because everyone needs to make a living. Apart from live-method research, his other books include: Nursing inpatients with anorexia nervosa (joint editor with Martin Pursey), Discussing Child and Adolescent Mental Health Nursing (with Sandy Fitzgibbon), The Male Nurse (by himself), The Adolescent Unit: a handbook for young people, their families, ethnographies about digital living and solution focused practice.

About Narratives, Blurred Learning & CAMHSville