want help from social services - then child must be referred to psychiatry

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At one point in time I was told that any help my family might be offered by Social Care Services would be entirely dependent on whether or not we chose to accept Social Services' offer of a referral to CAMHS for our eldest child. The child in question is very severely physically disabled, bright, determined, and at the time of referral very young and very frustrated ........

Oh! Brave New Medical World

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posted by Dr Crippen at 10:42 AM

A few days ago, I wrote about the modern, protocol-driven nonsense of forcing the families of newly diagnosed young diabetics to have a psychiatric assessment. This sad state of affairs is one of the many by-products of dumbing down. A small but significant number of such families will find that their newly diagnosed diabetic child will develop behavioural problems which impact on the whole family. They will benefit from help. For them, psychiatric help is a good thing and such help should be available to all who need it. Unfortunately, the lower echelons of our dumbed down health care professionals cannot distinguish between the concept of psychiatric help being available to all on a needs basis and psychiatric help being provided for all. If it is a good thing then all should have it. Whether or not they want it. Or need it. It is a huge waste resources but it avoids decision making, thus allowing the system to be managed, after a fashion, by those who have insufficient training to make decisions.The anguished parents of a physically disabled child wrote in to describe their experiences of this brave new medical world:

At one point in time I was told that any help my family might be offered by Social Care Services would be entirely dependent on whether or not we chose to accept Social Services' offer of a referral to CAMHS for our eldest child. The child in question is very severely physically disabled, bright, determined, and at the time of referral very young and very frustrated, especially in terms of communication.As parents, we were also frustrated, but more significantly, absolutely exhausted and unable to arrange a much-needed break from the 24-hour care of a child who, as well as being entirely dependent by necessity, would scream and spasm uncontrollably in terror at the slightest unexpected sight, sound, or touch. Hardly unusual behaviour for a small child with this particular neurological injury and related sensory/communication/medical difficulties. For the above reasons, the referral to Social Services was made through the local NHS paediatrics department, and stated that although we were excellent parents who provided a high level of care, we could not continue to cope without a break.We were disgusted at being bullied by Social Services to accept the referral to CAMHS and adamantly refused. We felt that the buck-passing dismissal to CAMHS, carrying with it, it seemed, a label of "behavioural problems" until reported otherwise, was inappropriate, unhelpful, and downright unethical when others genuinely need to access this service. Fortunately the sizeable number of medical and educational professionals already working with our child agreed that such a referral was right off the mark, and eventually, after a fair bit of fuss was made, the CAMHS referral became a non-issue, never mentioned.Whether such a non-issue will be exhumed and re-instated in the future remains to be seen. In any case, the child in question enjoys life, for the most part immensely, now has a useful understanding of the persistent infant reflexes that once terrorised him, is clearly mentally stable, and is successfully gaining more and more independence through communication devices. The care involved is still bloody hard work. Incidentally, we receive a minute amount of help from social services. Nevertheless, we remain certain that accepting the CAMHS referral would have had the potential to cause more serious future problems for our child than the un-doubted black mark on our family's Social Services file.See Comments under the orginal article here

It's an interesting reductio ad absurdum to think that child psychiatric care in the NHS is not only available to to all, independent of means but also to all independent of need. If resources were not wasted in this way, perhaps the Haringey tragedy might have been avoided. Glancing at the Haringey Council Child Protection" services webpage here, there must be a resource issue as they have not updated the site since August. Staggering.