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Been thinking a lot about that huge cliff edge that's too often experienced when moving from CAMHS to adult mental health services, and how unsatisfying it has been (for me at least) to see the response to this cliff edge being to delay it or make it more flexible.
(Sorry for essentially stealing a dear friend's words, she knows who she is, but it's been on my mind a lot since the publication of the Scottish Mental Health Strategy in 2017, and I never found the right words for it)
Services going up to 25, or there being flexibility between 16-25, isn't really getting to the root of the problem, which is simply that all too often transferring from CAMHS feels like you're being blindfolded and thrown off a cliff. It's delaying the inevitable.
And yes, I've heard the arguments about development, life stages, etc. that make a strong case for services up to 25. I'm not necessarily against it. But that doesn't mean we should just delay the throwing off the cliff until a young person reaches 25.
The problem for me wasn't necessarily my age, it was the complete difference in expectations and culture from one team to another. I stayed in CAMHS for six months after my eighteenth, and by all accounts, my transfer went great from that side.
But for six months, I was in a crisis, and my CAMHS team wanted me admitted but I didn't meet the "threshold" for admission to an adult ward. I went from being seen monthly by psychiatry as well as once a week by psychology and once by a nurse, to being seen once every two weeks.
Nothing could have prepared me for that sudden, huge step back in intervention, regardless of my age. If the same thing were to happen again, even now at 22, I still wouldn't cope.
