"Sussex Partnership NHS Trust
C.A.M.H.S. Exposed"
The truth and facts about how an NHS Trust committed staggering diagnostic negligence and wilful acts of harm against two autistic children and their autistic parent - and then covered it up with lies.
SPFT CAMHS - You Can Run, But You Can't Hide
2018-2020 and the failings just keep on coming
Well, I don't know how I missed this! And bear in mind, this was three years into Brighton & Hove Clinical Commissioning Group's five year plan to improve services (called the "Children and Young People’s Mental Health and Wellbeing Local Transformation Plan for Brighton and Hove 2015-2020"), so that they were fit-for-purpose, for mental health needs for children and young people. Yet more negative media on the failings of SPFT CAMHS. If you want to read the others leading up to and overlapping this point, click here.
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"Child mental health: Camhs 'not fit-for-purpose'"
24 September 2018
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BBC Panorama, Kids in Crisis is on Monday 24 September at 20:30 BST on BBC One.
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"Eventually, Jess was detained at Chalk Hill, a specialist child mental health hospital in Sussex, for her own safety. She spent nine months as an inpatient, and says she was assaulted by a staff member.
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"I was having a psychotic episode so I was like running on the floor, he grabbed my legs, pulled me back, did that and shook me upside down."
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Sussex Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, which runs the hospital, says concerns about treatment are taken "extremely seriously" and investigated "as a matter of urgency".
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Earlier this year, Jess was released and is now recovering back at home. She was told by the hospital that she had autism.
'I feel like if it had been diagnosed ages ago I probably would never even have had this journey. I would've just gone, 'OK, I need to do some therapy for Asperger's because it'll help me control my thoughts.'"
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Her mum agrees. "We were crying out for help and support for a very, very long time and she shouldn't have deteriorated to this level."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45607313
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Incidentally, Chalkhill was the same 'service' that failed to diagnose our autistic child's PDA and ADHD.
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SPFT's reply to this programme?
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"Our teams work extremely hard to help families access the right support for the difficulties they are facing."
Pfft! Really? How is it I and others are finding otherwise then SPFT CAMHS? How is it that after the 2013 scrutiny into your provision for autistic children you are still doing exactly the same things wrong, years later?
Let me remind you what some of those things are:
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no expertise in assessing and diagnosing autistic children
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no expertise in mental health of autistic children, despite that 1 in 10 children that access CAMHS are autistic!
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no respect for parents, in fact possessing a toxic parent-blame culture
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no recognition of your own shortcomings, institutional and individual arrogance
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callous disregard for the needs of children and their families and the longstanding detriment caused by your failings
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no understanding of the need for preventative health care
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no sense of urgency in assessing or treating a child's difficulties
It's quite clear this Trust is happy to take the money but not come up with the goods. What heartless people.
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And if you're thinking, 'well, this was almost two years ago, maybe they have improved since', no, they haven't. If you read this page, scroll down to the bottom and you will see our personal experience from 2019, and this person is Tweeting about their failings this year, in 2020:
And it's also official, this report from last month, July 2020, by the "Sussex Wide Children and Young Person’s Emotional Health and Wellbeing Service Review" says:
Well, isn't that just a lovely politically correct and polite way of saying "Sussex Partnership CAMHS - you are still crap!" How long does this rotten organisation need to improve? Children's lives are being destroyed by them. It's eight years since we first went to them, that's half a child's life ago and they are still unfit-for-purpose.