By the age of 14, half of all mental difficulties that someone may face in their life will have begun – and 75% of all difficulties will start before adulthood (Centre on the Developing Child, 2007: Kim-Cohen, et al., 2003). 

This is because a large amount of our brain development happens in our early years. And our very earliest experiences may be our most significant – the first 1,000 days of a child’s life is crucial, and the first two months have a disproportionately high impact on later life (Perry and Oprah, 2021). 

At the same time, only 10% of the mental health budget is spent on early years care. 

Limited resources and cycles of mental health

We know, from working closely CAMHS services, that colleagues within mental health services do a difficult job with limited resources, and that many have worked to bring about significant improvement in specialist child and adolescent mental health services in recent years. 

But are the resources going far enough, and is change happening in all the ways it needs to? 

A 2024 Samaritans Cymru report, Waiting for Change, found that support for people on the parenthood journey is inadequate. Suicide is the leading cause of death for new mothers in the UK, and new fathers already experiencing mental health difficulties are 50 times more likely to be considered a suicide risk than at other points in their life. By contrast, rates of PTSD following birth are around 4-6% (Ertan, Hingray, Burlacu, et al. , 2021). 

We also know that mental health difficulties experienced by parents can impact on the mental health of their children, contributing to intergenerational cycles of poor mental health. But if we are able to provide adequate support in childhood, and also for parents, we can start to break those cycles. 

Sharing stories to inform change

This means that, within support, we need to get it right for families so that they can get it right for their children. But we also need to get it right for the people working with in the system, so that burnout is reduced, and so that the hard work that goes into running and improving CAMHS services is reflected as much as possible in the outcomes for people accessing support. 

The CAMHS Truth Project is part of our contribution to that shared effort. The stories collected here help show – from the perspectives of young people, parents, and staff working within services – the day-to-day reality of working or living within or alongside CAMHS services.  

As with all Truth Projects, the stories here are presented as unvarnished and unchanged as possible. This is because sharing the honest reality of people’s experiences – the positive and the negative – is the closest we can get to living and feeling those experiences for ourselves. From there, it becomes easier to understand what has helped people the most, and what things future change can focus on. 

The positive stories are not about pointing out any particular service as a model to follow, and the negative stories are not about blame. The aim is to create a window into people’s own experiences, informing the things we call for as a charity, and starting the discussions that help us all ground our efforts for change in the realities of receiving, and delivering, mental health support within CAMHS.