How to reduce lagging in ratty catty
What can we learn about time – now, in the time of COVID-19 – from this sudden suspension of time which is not actually a suspension at all? This questioning of the future which is, curiously, so familiar to many of the young people whose mental health elicits our care? Disturbed adolescents may try to arrest a march of time that feels relentless by retreating into depression, or into their bedrooms: to halt their progress towards a future that is perceived as bleak, or simply unimaginable.
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Yet the time of adolescence itself often feels both chronic and acute, its difficulties regarded as perennial, even predictable, yet often plunging the young into crisis. For those in their teens, the COVID-19 pandemic arrives at a crucial time in development, as they transition from childhood to adulthood. Exams in the UK are cancelled school is out, or virtual universities have sent their students home. The world gives the impression of having halted what we might call ‘adolescent time'. In the time of the virus, we are thus adrift in the prevailing geo-spatial metaphors of the age: nowhere near the ‘front line’, we may find ourselves thrust suddenly towards it if a teenager makes a serious or dangerous attempt to self-harm or commit suicide. How, then, are we to consider the seriousness of psychological and emotional labour conducted in services such as CAMHS during a national crisis? Talking to young people and children about their anxieties, or even their considerable distress, appears low priority when compared to doctors and nurses battling COVID yet an adolescent death by suicide remains one of the most catastrophic events imaginable, for family, friends and professionals alike.
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Mental health has traditionally been lamented as the poor relation within the NHS, with psychiatry under-valued and repeated cries to achieve parity between mental and physical health ignored. Are we high priority or low? Frontline or routine? Do we, like primary care staff, rush to ‘man the barricades’ ( Davies, 2020, Waiting in Pandemic Times) – anxiety about the possibility of redeployment is spreading among mental health staff even where they are entirely untrained for physical health care – or do we hunker down at home to conduct therapy online for the foreseeable future? And what is foreseeable about the future, now, for the young patients, depressed, anxious or enduring the turbulence of adolescence, for whom the future was only hazily in view in the first place? The world is in crisis, but it is hard to position the acute and chronic crises of mental health work in the National Health Service (NHS) against the unfolding crisis we see on our screens. Building into the term the origins of the virus in 2019, it provides a stark reminder that, having ignored warnings from the medical world and then the evidence before our eyes, we are now always already trying to catch up ( Horton, 2020). COVID-19: the name itself encapsulates delay ( Flexer, 2020, Waiting in Pandemic Times).
#How to reduce lagging in ratty catty professional
The time of the COVID-19 virus brings a strange shifting of priorities to my professional life as a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in a Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in the UK.