General Sites

Child and Adolescent Emotional Health Links  Useful list of Links.

CAMHS Network A site for clinicians and managers run by clinicians. We started this website to pull together practical ideas, grounded in theory and clinical service evidence, to help CAMHS teams change. We believe change is always possible and using the  techniques described in this site you can reduce or eliminate your waiting lists, improve the service for the patients and improve the working lives of staff.

Adolescence Directory Online  Electronic guide to information on adolescent issues. It is a service of the Centre for Adolescent Studies at Indiana University. Educators, counsellors, parents, researchers, health practitioners, and teens can use ADOL to find Web resources.

Understanding Mental Illness  Makes sense of the bewildering variety of theoretical approaches which confront anyone trying to understand the problems of psychiatry, whether as a professional helper, a seeker of help, or just an interested observer. It shows that the many conflicting viewpoints which flourish can be understood only in terms of the philosophical systems underlying them - prior beliefs about what people are, and how we should try to understand them -and that these philosophical systems are themselves based on moral or political priorities.

camh.org.uk  forum for discussion & information resource for Child and Adolescent Emotional Health.

Look Out for All Children Astute examination of the cultural background that gives rise to many of the emotional difficulties of children and young people.

Association for Child & Adolescent Emotional Health  The Website for The Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health (formerly ACPP).

Samhsa’s Emotional Health Information Centre  Systems of care are developed on the premise that the mental health needs of children, adolescents, and their families can be met within their home, school, and community environments. These systems are also developed around these principles: child-centred, family-driven, strength-based, and culturally competent with interagency collaboration. The Child, Adolescent and Family Branch embraces and promotes these core principles of systems of care.

One man’s pragmatism is another man’s holocaust. 2005.

National CAMHS Support Service  UK site. News, good practice library, key documents, and a forum to exchange views and information.

Sociology of Health & Illness Journal Sociology of Health and Illness is an international journal which publishes sociological articles on all aspects of health, illness and medicine. It focuses particularly on empirical research, especially, though not exclusively, of a qualitative kind. The journal provides a sociological perspective on the theory of medical knowledge, the practice of medical work and the experience of receiving or giving medical care. The first 18 volumes of Sociology of Health & Illness are available free online.

Insight Into Emotional Illness  This short paper addresses mental illness from a sociological perspective. It is hoped that this insight may bring balance into the debate about 'mental illness' and help towards a better understanding of the problem.

The Child Advocate  The Child Advocate is devoted to children and the parents and professionals that work with them and advocate for them. Primarily, links to other sites.

Critical Perspectives on Emotional Health  This site provides information about critical perspectives on emotional distress and the mental health professions, and the institutional and social contexts in which they operate.

Social Care: Children and Family Services  This online resource is aimed at helping service providers, advocacy organisations, voluntary organisations and others involved with young people with learning difficulties who are going through transition and their families, to understand what sort of information they want and how to present it to them.

About Our Kids  The NYU Child Study Center offers science-based, research-driven psychiatric care to children and adolescents with learning, behavior and emotional disorders. News, Library, Research, Clinical Programmes, Education.

Sociology of Knowledge  What is knowledge, from a sociological perspective. Useful material for CAMHS clinicians since we work much of the time with relationship, family, group, and social dynamics problems.

Diagnosis  Is Diagnosis a Disaster?: A Constructionist Trialogue. From a constructionist standpoint, our languages for describing and explaining the world (and ourselves) are not derived from or demanded by whatever is the case. Rather, our languages of description and explanation are produced, sustained, and/or abandoned within processes of human interaction. Further, our languages are constituent features of cultural pattern. They are embedded within relationships in such a way that to change the language would be to alter the relationship.

The DSM - Pros and Cons The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, fourth edition, text revision [American Psychiatric Association. DSM-IV-TR, Washington, 2000] - or the DSM-IV-TR for short - describes Axis II personality disorders as "deeply ingrained, maladaptive, lifelong behaviour patterns". But the classificatory model the DSM has been using since 1952 is harshly criticised as woefully inadequate by many scholars and practitioners.

TeenOutOfReach Emotional Health Resources

Psychiatric Deviance Most of the disagreement over the concept of deviance appears to boil down to a choice between two alternative definitions: a normative definition versus a relativistic definition of deviance. The normative definition is the older of these two sociological conceptualisations. According to this definition, deviance refers to behaviour that violates social norms or to persons that engage in such behaviour. Only in the past few decades has this traditional definition of deviance been seriously challenged by sociologists who favour the relativistic alternative. According to the relativistic definition, deviance refers to behaviour or persons that are defined as deviant by social audiences. This definition is termed relativistic because it views persons or their behaviour as deviant only relative to the way other people react to them.

Sociology of Deviance Over the past century an increasing number of human problems have come into the jurisdiction of the medical profession. This process has been termed the medicalization of society.  We will examine core theoretical and empirical texts that examine this issue, especially the origins and consequences of medicalization.

Children of Parents with a Mental Illness  Resource centre for information relating to the care and management of families where a parent has a mental illness. The information on this site has been designed to meet the needs of workers in specific fields: health, education, legal, youth and community, etc.

Royal College of Psychiatry Focus Site  Launched in 1997, FOCUS promotes clinical and organisational effectiveness in child and adolescent mental health services, with an emphasis on incorporating evidence-based research into everyday practice.

Classic Theories of Child Development  Erikson, Mahler and Freud. A month by month examination of development in infancy.

Freud: Life and Work  This site is dedicated to the life and work of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. It is conceived so to offer information about his biography, self-analysis and work and also about the personalities who interacted, more or less, with his ideas, with the development and recognition of psychoanalysis. We also offered a few bibliographical notes, quotations and references concerning Freud and his activity in the psychoanalysis field. The psychoanalytical movement started by Freud, the anti-Freudian, dissident trends are also approached in this site.

Emotional Health and Psychology Resources  The oldest annotated directory of mental health resources for professionals and consumers on the Internet.

Mental Illness  Psychiatry involves theories of the mind, theories of the causes of mental disorders, classification schemes for those disorders, research about the disorders, proven treatments and research into new treatments, and a number of professions whose job it is to work with or on behalf of people with mental disorders. The philosophical study of psychiatry discusses conceptual, ethical, metaphysical, social, and epistemological issues that arise in all these aspects of psychiatry Central to this study is the nature of mental illness.

National Children’s Bureau  NCB promotes the voices, interests and well-being of all children and young people across every aspect of their lives. As an umbrella body for the children’s sector in England and Northern Ireland, we provide essential information on policy, research and best practice for our members and other partners.

Psychodiagnosis  Selected references explore the basis of psychodiagnosis and the ramifications of practice.

Mental Health: Issues and Controversies  Open Directory Project Links.

General Child and Adolescent Emotional Health Links  Open Directory Project Links.

Joe Sharkey Joe Sharkey's most acclaimed book to date was released in 1994, Bedlam: Greed, Profiteering, and Fraud in a Mental Health System Gone Crazy, an investigation of the burgeoning psychiatric industry. Focusing on sensational cases in Texas and elsewhere within the US, Sharkey exposes how powerful elements within the industry manoeuvred to exploit exploding new markets when health insurance providers began covering costs for in-hospital mental health treatment, in part by basing admission and discharge decisions solely on insurance. Sharkey traces soaring mental health costs to the arrogant and often criminal marketing practices of biopsychiatry that began when the industry boomed in the late 1980's, with the number of psychiatric hospitals more than doubling between 1984 and 1989.

Concept of Mental Illness  The concept of mental illness is explored through an examination of four key foundational issues. These are (1) the notion of the "mental" as it relates to psychopathology; (2) the concept of illness; (3) the relationship of mental illness to concepts of function and malfunction; and (4) sociocultural dimensions of psychopathology. The problematic status of the concept of mental illness is investigated through locating it within the various discourses of biomedicine, psychology, law, and sociology and by explicating and relating the philosophical underpinnings of those discourses.

Psychminded  Perspectives on Practice: for all who work in psychology, psychiatry and mental health.

Mind to Take a Pill? So why do we take pills again? It's quite simple. Doctors prescribe them, pharmacists deliver the merchandise, the customers purchase the product, and the pharmaceutical companies make a profit. It's a running industry that has been prospering for decades now. Nevertheless, is the population's best interest still their first priority?

Wikipedia Anti-Psychiatry Entry Anti-psychiatry refers to approaches (sometimes seen as a coherent movement) which fundamentally challenge the theory or practice of mainstream psychiatry in general, and biological psychiatry in particular. Common criticisms include that psychiatry: uses medical concepts and tools inappropriately; treats patients against their will or is overly dominant compared to other approaches; is compromised by financial and professional links with pharmaceutical companies; uses a system of categorical diagnosis that is stigmatizing (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and is perceived by too many of its “patients” as demeaning and controlling.

TeenScreen TeenScreen is now being administered in the nation’s public school system and children are being regularly diagnosed with one, or more, disorders chosen from the close to 400 listed in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV" (DSM), also known as the psychiatric "Billing Bible." Critics view TeenScreen is a main components in an overall pharmaceutical industry-backed marketing scheme pushed along by the NFC, aimed at recruiting new customers for psychiatric drugs.