For any readers based in Hackney where I work, I’m reposting this in response to Saturday’s SAFAPLACE conference at Stoke Newington Secondary School. What was an excellent conference was notable for there being no discussion about the impact of adverse childhood experiences. I’m very grateful to discover Elizabeth’s work
Throughout my twenty year career as a psychologist working in Specialist Children’s Mental Health Services (SCAMHS) two frequently repeated mantras have been amongst the biggest sources of frustration for me:
“It’s a social problem, not a mental disorder” and “the child needs to be stable to access therapy”; the latter often responded to with the helpless reply “but the child need’s therapy in order to be stable”. Indeed, much of the tension between Health and Social Care can be boiled down to these two themes.
I understand, of course, that service design and a splitting of health and social care lies at the root of this; along with a scarcity of resources and a need to carve the work up somehow. However, as a psychologist employed by health, I see a child’s context and life experiences as fundamental to their mental health and emotional wellbeing. Ironically, when it comes down to individual…
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A Better NHS 
Thank you for the repost – it has been great to find like minded people through this process!
Spreading the word to as wide an audience as possible will benefit society in general.
Having read what you’ve reposted, I note that it it uses the terms ACEs and aces interchangeably. I suspect that if the author were talking about something unpleasant with the acronymm GAY, they would not have casually referred to GAYs as gays. Aces also experience ACEs and a little bit of consideration can go a long way.