"Just another adult"

I first joined CAMHS in 2021, seeing a male worker who i felt as though he couldn’t understand the mentality of a teenage girl, especially within such an age where there are ten times more social pressures on adolescent than before.

Unfortunately it seems many of the mental health workers you have grew up in a society where they didn’t have the same access to the internet, and I feel this social divide between kids now and the adults we are to trust needs to be covered more thoroughly. Sometimes the bad things in our life are impossible to escape from due to phones, they have bred a generation of anxious youngsters that are under the constant fear of having someone filming their most embarrassing moments, or even just embarrassing themselves slightly. We aren’t able to be carefree like kids have and should still be, the schools have put these measures in place to stop bullying but cannot do anything about internet bullying. 

Another thing is it often feels as if the workers I have met don’t understand what I feel, a lot of the time it just feels like I go there, I rant and I get brushed off with some sort of ‘technique’ rather than feeling they are motivated to push me as a client.  My more recent worker has been a lot more helpful and assertive which i did appreciate but overall I feel the fact that the CAMHS workers cannot share personal experiences and details really puts up a divide between the worker and the service users, it stops us from feeling like we can relate and trust the people. It makes us feel like they are just another adult that doesn’t understand why it’s different for us. 

On two separate occasions i made my way to my appointment at CAMHS and was left in the waiting room with my worker not turning up, my mum and i were not contacted before this.