Child and Youth Mental Health Service

Clinical service overview

Our service provides mental health services to children and young people experiencing a variety of mental health conditions and their families.

Specialist family-based interventions address the following concerns:

• Infant mental health;
• Complex developmental assessment in children and adolescents;
• Eating disorders;
• Co-occurring mental health and intellectual disability; and
• Interventions to address mental health distress (including self-harm and/or suicidal thoughts), behavioural disturbance, trauma, and poor school attendance.

Our teams are multidisciplinary and include: Occupational Therapists, Social Workers, Mental Health Nurses, Psychologists, Dieticians, Speech Pathologists, as well as Child and Adult Psychiatrists and Lived Experience Youth and Family Peer Workers and system advocates.

We see family and other support networks as integral to the mental health recovery journey. Initial family sessions will usually be offered to families at the start of treatment. This helps ensure everyone in the family and/or support network has opportunity to identify what is important for them to support treatment outcomes. These sessions also often help strengthen family relationships and address misunderstandings.

Some families require brief intervention and some require longer case management and treatment. The length of service engagement is determined through discussion about needs and preferences. Often our teams work with infants, children, young people and families where treatment has been unsuccessful and/or where multidisciplinary treatment is required to address complexity.

Experienced clinicians also offer support, primary and secondary consultations to other health professionals and service providers to help their knowledge and understanding of mental health needs and interventions.

Typical referral concerns can include:

Babies and toddlers:

• Persistent feeding difficulties or poor weight gain
• Persistent crying, restlessness or difficulty being comforted
• Sleeping problems that do not settle over time
• Unusual quietness or lack of interest in parents and surroundings
• Long and frequent temper tantrums
• Persistent clinginess
• Restricted play

Children:

• Persistent defiance
• Impulsivity or overactivity
• Reluctance or refusal to attend school
• Being bullied
• Problems with sleeping or eating regularly

Teens and Young people:

• Feeling excessively anxious, worried, unhappy or shy
• Changes in thinking, personality or behaviour that impact family, relationships, school or work
• Difficulty controlling emotions and impulses
• Distress from a traumatic incident or experience of abuse (either recent or in the past) incidents
• Trouble concentrating, thinking clearly or remembering things
• Loss of enjoyment or motivation
• Unusual experiences such as hearing voices, seeing strange things or things seeming different
• Thoughts of self-harm or suicide
• Where family or friends have expressed concern about personality or behavioural changes
• Physical complaints that could be caused by emotional stress

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