This story is presented as written. As such, views expressed below are the personal opinion of the author. Health systems are complex places to navigate for everyone working and existing within them; stories are presented to help find ways forward – and to reduce shame, not shift it.

Author wishes to remain anonymous

I adopted my daughter, Jez. She was taken into care and fostered at 2 days old and placed with me when she was 10 months old. When she was two and 3/4 she suddenly started displaying distress. Over the years I tried to find what was causing her problems, but was told I was doing a good job, it was just adoption stuff. By the time she was 9 she was regularly having meltdowns, anxiety etc.

We eventually got to CAMHS who agreed to start therapy with her. We promised our daughter we would stay with her until she was ready for us to leave, but on the first session the therapist asked us to leave and we complied. In the car on the way home we discussed this with our daughter who said she had not wanted us to leave yet and we promised that the next week we would stay until she was ready. However the therapist was not happy about this and refused to see my daughter a second time.

Instead she was offered ‘art therapy’ which was useless and my daughter masked all the way through, giving the art therapist what she wanted to hear. At the end of her sessions we were called in to view her ‘work’ and could see that she had been duplicating things she did at home to please the therapist, rather than expressing anything unique or personal. We therefore did not clap and praise our daughters ‘work’ because we could see exactly how she had played the therapist.

At this point in time we did not know why our daughter had the problems she had, and nothing I had researched fully explained every aspect of her behaviour and difficulties.

CAMHS called us in for a meeting where they basically tore us off a strip, and told me I was ‘overly cognitive’ (not something I think they would have levelled at a man; we are a lesbian couple) and overly protective. We were told our daughter had no problems, and that in fact we were the problem – especially as we had started home educating her when she was 6 because school was causing her big problems.

Things were problematised without them even understanding our family. For example, the fact that our daughter would let us know when she was going outside – we were told this was controlling and overly protective. They didn’t bother to find out that we live on a 10 acre small holding, and if your young child leaves the house you can’t just see them out of the window playing in the garden, or put your head out of the window and call them. Equally, we would tell her if we were leaving the house, for the same reason. CAMHS basically failed to address her needs or help her in anyway, and vilified us in the process. It was a horrendous process.

Not only did they fail to help us and her, they failed to spot an autistic girl when she was sitting in front of them. I eventually stumbled on girls and autism and everything fell into place as to why my daughter had behaved the way she had etc. A few years later she was diagnosed as autistic by the local authority. Finally we understood our daughter fully, but without thanks to the many professionals we had turned to for help since she was two years old.

People wait years to see CAHMS in the hope their child will be helped, but so far I have never heard of this happening and I [will] avoid them like the plague. They repeatedly blame parents and don’t see conditions in children which they are meant to know about.

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