Abstract
The author, a child and adolescent psychoanalytic psychotherapist working in the UK NHS, ponders the varied impacts of 'lockdown' on adolescents, their parents and the psychotherapists who work with them, during the COVID-19 pandemic. She asks, particularly, how psychological therapies are positioned during such a crisis, and whether the pressures of triage and emergency can leave time and space for sustained emotional and psychological care. She wonders how psychoanalytic time with its sustaining rhythm can be held onto in the face of the need for triage on the one hand and the flight to online and telephone delivery on the other. Above all, the author questions how the apparent suspension of time during lockdown is belied by the onward pressure of adolescent time, and how this can be understood by, and alongside, troubled adolescents.
Highlights
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)
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
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? (What is foreseeable about the future, 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?)
Summary
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). Keywords Adolescent mental health, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, COVID-19 pandemic, deliberate self-harm, quarantine, temporality in health care
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