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More and more young people between the ages of 12 and 18 are presenting to NHS services with symptoms of depression. In September 2017, research carried out by UCL (University College London) Institute of Education and the University of Liverpool found that nearly a quarter of 14-year-old girls (24%) and 9% of boys the same age are depressed (The Guardian, 2017). NHS clinics are overflowing with referrals for adolescents presenting with the symptoms of severe depression: suicidality, self-harm, retreat from the external world, hopelessness and high levels of anxiety.
In the current climate of stretched resources and underfunding, the NHS is becoming increasingly focussed on short-term interventions as the solution to meet the demand of long waiting lists through higher/faster throughput of children and young people. The dilemma, though, is how to provide a short-term solution to often chronic and long-term difficulties in such a way that change and recovery can be meaningful and sustained.
Long-term psychotherapy in the NHS is costly and there is the developing sense that if child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the public sphere is to survive it needs to adapt to the current climate in order to maintain its important and valuable place in the treatment of child and adolescent mental health difficulties. So how does a profession, rooted as we are in a history of long-term work, hold onto not only our place in services which focus on delivering short-term interventions, but also our identity within the demands of a resource-driven public service?
Short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy (STPP) may perhaps be one solution. Although there is, as the manual points out (p. 42), a rich history of short-term interventions for families, children and adolescents in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, STPP is the first to have been manualised and developed from an evidence base of research work with a specific group.
Short-Term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Adolescents