One in 10 will develop an eating disorder before their 25th birthday. Hospitalisations from self-harm have doubled in the past three years. Rates of childhood depression in some parts of the country are up by 600%. The average onset age for depression was 45 in the 1960s; with pressures around competition and performance anxiety across society at levels unknown to any previous generation, is it any surprise that the average onset age today is 14.
In a recent interview for the Guardian, Dr Nihara Krause, a consultant clinical psychologist said “The increase in mental ill-health among our young people is exacerbated by our trophy culture. Outside school our body-obsessed, share-everything culture subjects them to new forms of scrutiny.” Within healthcare, a recent survey of 300 GPs in England raised particular concern about the availability of NHS/CAMHS help for children aged 11-18. While 61% of respondents were seeing more cases than five years ago, 83% of GPs described NHS/CAMHS services as either inadequate or totally inadequate.
So where does this leave teachers and schools, already struggling with the additional pressure of exams, cut-backs and low morale? They are increasingly faced with being the first (and perhaps) only line of defence for children suffering with a range of mental health issues. These issues can emerge in children as young as 3 or 4, having a profound effect throughout their lives on their capacity to learn, build resilient friendships and maintain a positive self-image. For teachers and schools, identifying young people with emerging mental health issues can be difficult enough; knowing how to support them and who to turn to for specialist provision can be even harder.
Art, Drama and Music therapists, known collectively as Allied Health Professionals and regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council, are a growing cohort of clinicians working in partnership with schools to improve child and adolescent mental health outcomes.
Yorkmead Primary School in central Birmingham is a diverse and positive school dealing with a range of inner city challenges and opportunities. It’s deputy head, Alex Newman-Smith is all too aware of the difficulties in accessing specialist CAMHS services in a timely manner for children dealing with parental bereavement, divorce, low self-esteem or exam pressures. Since 2010, CAMHS budgets have been cut by £85m meaning schools such as Yorkmead are caught in the growing gap between what the school nurse/counsellor can provide and increasingly high entry thresholds to CAMHS. This mean that children are given the message “get sicker before we will help you”. Having been signposted to music therapy in 2015, Alex Newman-Smith’s is a viewpoint which could be repeated across the UK if academies, school governors and teachers knew where to access specialist support to bridge the gap between in-house provision and limited CAMHS services.
“Having been signposted to Chroma, I found an informative and supportive organisation that were adaptable and sensitive to the needs of our pupils. I was particularly impressed with how we would be involved in the selection of a therapist who best suited our pupils and that there was no pressure if, on meeting them, we didn’t feel we were compatible. The pupils have responded incredibly positively and improvements in their well-being, attitudes, self-esteem and academic achievement have been significant. The sessions have been massively successful in the short amount of time they have been running and therefore we have increased our provision from 0.5 days a week to 1.5 days a week.”
Chroma is a national organisation working with education, health and social care providers across the UK. Currently working in schools across the primary, secondary, special and academy provision its team of art, drama and music therapists are an invaluable additional line of specialist support for children with mental health issues. In their experience, therapeutic support for children and especially teenagers is often best provided by an arts-based approach, rather than through more traditional “talking therapies”. As more and more schools are required to measure outcomes across all their activities, therapists such as those from Chroma, access assessment tools designed to use teenager’s interests in the arts, as a way to highlight emerging mental health issues. This helps document outcomes for children and young people attending arts-based therapies in a robust and valid way.
One such tool is The Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale (HUMS), designed by music therapists Dr Suvi Saarikallio, Dr Christian Gold & Dr Katrina McFerran. Dr McFerran, from Melbourne University, Australia developed HUMS to measure music engagement from the perspective of proneness for adolescent depression. Following detailed statistical analysis and testing, Dr McFerran highlights HUMS as comprehensive, valid and applicable as a screening instrument for identifying adolescent’s risky patterns of music engagement regarding their proneness for depression. HUMS may also be particularly applicable when measuring health-outcomes and looking at teenager’s musical engagement as a buffer/resource/protective feature against stressors and other risk factors.
In the light of recent GPs survey findings, that paint a bleak picture of NHS/CAMHS support for children with mental health problems, the work of arts-based therapists at Chroma with access to user-friendly and robust screening tools such as HUMS, provide a powerful, clear new direction for schools and governors to take. Whilst there are positive noises from Government about supporting children in the care system, and excellent specialist therapeutic support for adopted children via the Adoption Support Fund, it seems incumbent on teachers and schools to identify specialist mental health support, to be provided in schools by Allied Health Professionals, such as art, drama of music therapists.
For further information, please click to contact Chroma
