You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This collection of essays and papers is about the work of an inner city community based young people's mental health service called the Brandon Centre. The book has two enthusiastic Forewords: one by Peter Wilson, the eminent child psychotherapist and campaigner for child and adolescent mental health services, and the other by Professor Peter Fonagy, the psychoanalyst and international academic who has driven the debate about empirical evaluation of child psychotherapy. Wilson, a previous Director of the Brandon Centre, describes the setting as ‘a relatively small building, operating on its own in a medium sized charity in the uncertain waters of the voluntary sector, without the advantage of a large infrastructure’. Professor Fonagy states that the book is a model that shows, ‘a highly practical and enlightening way to reconfigure the psychoanalytic approach to a clinical problem’ and that Baruch has ‘evolved a method for the routine scrutinizing of clinical effectiveness which could help the majority of services that provide help for this age group’.
The book is a team effort containing a variety of chapters demonstrating the breadth of the Centre's work and the interests of the clinicians. It is structured into four parts: the first contains four papers focusing on ‘Theoretical and practical aspects of engaging and maintaining young people in treatment’. The second describes ‘Services for high priority groups of young people’; the third explores ‘The evaluation of mental health outcome’ and the fourth is in fact the Conclusion.
The four papers in Part One attend to some of the central challenges facing clinical practitioners trying to engage adolescents in treatment. The first chapter is about a six-session psychodynamic therapy service, which has been a highly successful component of the Brandon Centre's service development. George Mak-Pierce develops a theory that explores the role of attachment and rank, or status, in the inner life of adolescents. These ideas a