Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) is the name for care provided by the NHS and other organisations in the United Kingdom for children, generally until school-leaving age, who have difficulties with their emotional well-being or are deemed to have persistent behavioural problems.
[3] Worldwide in 2021, one in seven 10-19 year-olds have mental health problems, with approximately 14% of adolescents, experiencing depression, anxiety, and behavioural disorders.
[13][14] Although hospitals fulfill an important role in overall systems of care, children and young people who are admitted can be at risk of losing touch with family, friends and education.
[24] As of December 2016, some young English people with eating disorders were being sent hundreds of miles away to Scotland because the services they required were not available locally.
In response the government had adopted a policy of ending such arrangements by 2021, and had allocated a cumulative £150M to improve local availability of care.
[29] According to a collaboratively produced service design model, high-quality CAMHS require:[30] Between 2016 and 2020 in Wales, almost 52,000 individual mental health crisis events involving ambulance attendance, A&E visits or emergency admission were recorded amongst 11-24 year olds.
[34] Understanding the different kinds of crisis services and how young people and their families experience help in those situations is crucial for making care better.
[36] In the United Kingdom children's and young people's mental health treatment was for decades the remit of the Child Guidance Movement increasingly working after World War II with local educational authorities and often influenced by psychoanalytic ideas.
In 1998, 24 CAMHS Innovation Projects started, and the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 established related youth offending teams.
[42] Despite the introduction of the four-tier framework in 1995, reports and reviews have consistently described UK children’s mental health services as fragmented, uncoordinated, variable, inaccessible and lacking an evidence-base.
These include: From about 2013 onward major concerns have been expressed about reductions in CAMHS, and apparently increasing demand, and in 2014 the parliamentary Health Select Committee investigated and reported on provision.
[55] The 2019 implementation plan has been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic which has led to increased demand for CAMHS[56] and an impact on the availability of appropriately trained staff.