Blog

All children need help to find their voice. For some young people, the act of speaking up or speaking out is associated with experiences of being ignored, discredited or silenced. To mark the beginning of Children’s Mental Health Week 2024, adolescent psychotherapist and author Jeanine Connor reflects on the therapeutic process of enabling a young person to believe that their voice matters – and to feel heard outside the therapy room, too.

How can we continue to hold risk when so many clients are in crisis, and when under-resourced support and emergency services appear on the brink of collapse? Jude Boyles, manager of a Refugee Council therapy service, shares the mounting – and perhaps familiar – pressures being experienced by her team, and explores what we can do to contain clients and colleagues in a world where ambulances may never arrive.

New windows on risk have been opened by online therapy with children and young people. In her third occasional blog about her work, independent social worker Gretchen Precey shares some of the emerging dilemmas with which our safeguarding procedures and trainings need to keep pace – from the unseen presence of family members to what we might glimpse on the mantlepiece.

What are some of the specific dilemmas faced by therapists in safeguarding the children and young people with whom they work? As we mark the end of Children’s Mental Health Week 2021, independent social worker Gretchen Precey embarks on an occasional blog addressing some of the common questions and dilemmas that arise in her counsellor trainings and consultation sessions.