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• Social worker and child and adolescent psychotherapist: Stuart

Social worker and child and adolescent psychotherapist: Stuart

This Case Study belongs to Child psychotherapist.

Stuart has a Masters degree in social work and a Masters in child and adolescent psychotherapy. He is a social worker and child and adolescent psychotherapist.

I decided that I’d like to train in child and adolescent psychotherapy when, aged 20, I worked with very deprived and challenging boys in a specialist therapeutic community. The psychotherapists at the community helped me to make sense of the children and their behaviours and difficulties in relating to other people, peers and adults.

It’s helpful to gain wide and varied experience in work with children in different settings before starting child psychotherapy training. The training is very much a journey of self-discovery alongside one of developing knowledge about human relationships in their widest sense. Be prepared for a long, arduous and, at times, painful journey.

During my training I encountered a very broad spectrum of human conditions that may be labelled as mental illness, located in people of all ages and backgrounds. These encounters were closely supervised leading to substantial learning and skills development in the field of psychotherapeutic interventions with individuals, groups and organisations. All the practical and theoretical component parts of the training are directly relevant to the process of becoming a child and adolescent psychotherapist.

Child and adolescent psychotherapists tend to develop clinical specialisms after qualifying. My own passion is working with the ‘care’ system. This brings me into contact with a broad range of young people who are either fostered, adopted or living in residential settings or with family members other than their own birth parents.

Child psychotherapists eventually spend more time undertaking supervisory, teaching and consultation work alongside time spent in clinical practice in the presence of young people, their carers and other professionals. This means undertaking a wide variety of tasks in many different settings, which can be both stimulating and exhausting.

I particularly enjoy the human contact aspect of my work and the opportunities to work together with colleagues of different backgrounds and trainings with a focus on trying to make sense of the human condition. It is such a huge field that new discoveries are being made all the time about why some people feel and behave the way they do. This makes the work lively and exciting a lot of the time.

The bureaucratic realities of working in the modern NHS can be tiresome at times and stifling of innovation. We’re also caught up in a political struggle for survival in this era of evidence-based practice, NICE guidelines and a tendency towards wanting quick results. I think of child psychotherapists as being akin to the slow food movement: our outcomes take time but are often well worth the wait!

As a relative newcomer to the profession I’d love one day to become a consultant and, if I’m very fortunate, I may be able to leave some kind of lasting impression on the world. This may take the form of published material or the memories of my work and self that I leave in the minds of the people I encounter. I’ve already been very lucky to be influenced by many memorable colleagues myself.

Case Study sourced by Sarah Nichols of AGCAS, 20 November 2009.