Teenage patients let down by gap in mental health care provision

Poor planning is causing young people with mental health problems to miss out on adult mental health support when they leave the care of child mental health services, according to a study.

The experience of the “vast majority” of young people making the transition between child and adult mental health support is that it is “poorly planned, poorly executed and poorly experienced”, researchers at the University of Warwick found.

Their study, which has been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry under the title ‘Process, outcome and experience of transition from child to adult mental healthcare: multi-perspective study’, looked at 154 teenagers with mental health problems.

The researchers found that 58 per cent did not receive support from adult mental health services after leaving the care of colleagues in children’s mental health.

Those with severe mental illness, who were on medication or who had been admitted to hospital were more likely to  transfer successfully to adult mental health services. Among those less likely to make this transition were those with neurodevelopmental disorders, emotional or neurotic disorders and emerging personality disorders.

In a fifth of cases, those who moved between children’s and adult mental health services were discharged without even being seen by adult mental health professionals.

The University of Warwick’s Professor Swaran Singh, who led the research, said: “Despite adolescence being a risk period for the emergence of serious mental disorders, substance misuse, other risk-taking behaviours and poor engagement with health services, mental health provision is often patchy during this period.”

Factors in this breakdown of care were a lack of understanding between child and mental health professionals and the use of different computer and record-keeping systems.