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Liz Bodycote’s ‘Holding the time’ feels important and timely. She traces a shared root between climate breakdown and the steady fragmentation of our CAMHS clinics, exploring how neoliberal extraction devours the time and relational space that care depends on. Time becomes consumed by administrative overwhelm, targets and risk management, leaving in its wake what Weintrobe (2021) describes as a ‘culture of uncare.’ Bodycote suggests this sits in tension with the foundations of child psychotherapy, where stopping to think and holding the time are central. In this context, maintaining the analytic hour begins to feel less like routine practice and more like a quiet radical act.
In this response piece, I want to reflect on my own experience of trying to hold the time in CAMHS while also keeping in mind the wider context of climate breakdown. I also want to write this as a way of keeping the conversation going, to keep thinking about how to navigate our work in time.
One day, while I was setting up the psychotherapy room for a patient, I noticed that the clock had stopped. This is a fairly common occurrence in my clinic, so I climbed onto a chair, took it down and went in search of another clock to swap it with for the duration of my session. It was a quiet day in the clinic and there were several empty rooms around me, but to my surprise every room I looked in also had a stopped clock. They were not all stopped at the same time, which would have been uncanny, but it still felt strange and I wondered if anyone else had noticed.
In CAMHS, there is an administrative phrase which is given much significance: stop the clock. It refers to the moment a referral moves off the waiting list and into the system. On this day, it made me think how much there may be a wish for this to be true.
Mainstream CAMHS can feel permanently located in the present, moving from moment to moment, assessing, scheduling, patching up and managing risk. Time becomes structured, meas