AICAFMHA:
promoting mental health for young Australians
Australian Infant, Child, Adolescent and Family Mental Health Association Ltd
ABN 87 093 479 022


AICAFMHA E-News in Brief Issue # 5.14

News in Brief - Issue # 5.14 (Nov 21, 2005)

AICAFMHA News

The latest update from the COPMI Project is now online and can be viewed at http://www.aicafmha.net.au/jsp/copmi/index.jsp
This update includes a reminder about the COPMI surveys for Mental Health Workers, Consumers and Carers. Mental Health Workers, Consumers and Carers continue to be urged to complete an on-line survey about ?copmi?- related practices in Australia. Both surveys have a link from the COPMI and AICAFMHA web home-pages.
Pdf files and hard copies of the surveys can be requested from Elizabeth Fudge for those people not able to access the internet.
State/territory summaries of ?de-identified? information will be given to individual Mental Health Departments and a national summary will be provided to the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.

Memberships for the association continue to roll in and thanks go to members for their patience in receiving their membership certificates. Details and benefits of AICAFMHA membership for the 2005/06 financial year are listed at http://www.aicafmha.net.au/membership/index.htm.
To subscribe, you can choose to:
- print and post/fax an application form available from the website at http://www.aicafmha.net.au/membership/index.htm OR
- phone Sue on 08 8132 0786 and have your credit card details handy.

Don't forget about the 17th International IACAPAP Congress to be held in Melbourne in Sept 2006. View details online at http://www.aicafmha.net.au/conferences/melbourne2006/index.html. The Call for Papers is still open. The Call for Symposia deadline has also been extended... so it's not too late to get those symposia proposals in! This is shaping up to be a big event - we look forward to catching up with many of you there.

What's On

The Events Calendar keeps you up to date, with what's happening in Australia and around the world.
New Events in our database are listed below.

Event Name: 4th Biennial National Family and Community Strengths Conference
Event Dates: Dec 5, 2005 - Dec 8, 2005

Event Name: Niftey 2006 Conference: Prevention Now or Pay Later
Event Dates: Feb 8, 2006 - Feb 9, 2006

Event Name: Tenth Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect
Event Dates: Feb 14, 2006 - Feb 16, 2006

Event Name: International Conference on Counselling
Event Dates: Jul 6, 2006 - Jul 9, 2006

Why not browse through all the Events we have listed and if you have an event coming up email secretary@aicafmha.net.au so we can include it in our Calendar.

Mental Health News

COPMI Surveys for Australian Mental Health Workers and Consumers & Carers

Mental health consumers who are parents of children under 18 and their carers are invited to complete an important survey regarding local services for parents and their children.

COPMI Survey ? Consumers and Carers - Tell us what?s happening (or not) in your local area.
Go to http://www.copmi.net.au and follow the link at the bottom of the page to the Consumer and Carer Survey and complete the survey by December 1st 2005. If you are unable to complete an on-line form or would like to receive hard copies of the form to give to other consumers and carers to complete, please contact Elizabeth Fudge (fudgee@aicafmha.net.au or Ph: (08) 8161 6859).

COPMI Survey ? Mental health Workers - Tell us what?s happening (or not) in your local area.
Mental health workers are being urged to complete an important survey regarding local services for parents with mental health problems and their children.
Go to http://www.copmi.net.au and follow the link at the bottom of the page to the Mental Health Worker survey and complete the survey by December 1st 2005.

Please assist us to know what?s happening in your part of Australia and/or where there are gaps. We will share all information provided with your State/Territory MH Department and with the Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing.

FACE THE FACTS - COUNTERING MYTHS ABOUT REFUGEES, MIGRANTS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

28 October 2005

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner Tom Calma launched a new publication today titled Face the Facts - which provides factual, easy-to-read information about refugees and asylum seekers, migration and multiculturalism and Indigenous people.

?In the current environment of fear and insecurity, it is more important than ever that our multicultural values of mutual tolerance, social equity and respect for cultural and religious diversity are maintained,? Mr Calma said.

?Increased hostility towards Arab and Muslim Australians in the current international and domestic political climate shows the real need for facts, not myths.

?The newly-updated version of Face the Facts aims to provide clear and accurate information to counter myths and stereotypes that often surrounds debate on these issues.?

The publication was first released in 1997 and is one of the Commission?s most popular resources. It is used by teachers and students as an education resource, and by members of parliament, journalists and community groups.

The Face the Facts booklet is a summary of the online version which provides more detailed information and further reading sources to thoroughly explore specific topics. It is available at www.humanrights.gov.au/racial_discrimination/face_facts/

Child suicide rate alarms youth commissioner - Qld

(ABC Online) The Queensland Commissioner for Children and Young People says she is deeply concerned about figures that have found children are taking their lives at a younger age in the state.

The first ever report by the commission shows between January 1, 2004 and June 30 this year, nine children under the age of 14 committed suicide in the state.

Overall, 19 young people took their own lives with six of those Indigenous.

Commissioner Elizabeth Fraser says the report's information will help the Government tackle the issue.

"That's why we've highlighted it for an area of further work and we will be looking and talking to other agencies and trying to get a handle on what is actually happening," she said.

Queensland's child suicide rate has been linked to an increase in the number of children lacking stable adult influences in their lives.

Full article at http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200511/s1500815.htm

Aynsley-Green tackles school bullies in UK

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
New children's czar vows: 'I'll stamp out the school bullies' In a week in which a teenager was jailed for battering one of his tormentors to death, Al Aynsley-Green tells Amelia Hill why he has put tackling bullying at the top of his priorities
Sunday November 13, 2005

Observer

The job of England's first children's commissioner is so new and untested that Al Aynsley-Green, who took up his post last July, is still operating out of a temporary office in Whitehall and has yet to hire his full quota of staff. There is, however, one issue on which he already feels so passionately that he has decided to use his inaugural public appearance next Monday to commit himself to its eradication.

'I have had hundreds of in-depth conversations with children since accepting this post and I can tell you that the one thing every child I have met has been affected by, with virtually no exceptions, is bullying,' he told The Observer in the first one-on-one interview he has given in his new role.

'Bullying has an enormous impact on its victims ... both mentally and physically, and I was taken aback to find that almost every child I met chose to bring up the issue ... citing examples of how it had affected their lives,' he said.

Aynsley-Green's decision to declare his dedication to the issue has fallen in a tragically apposite week: last Wednesday, Tommy Kimpton, 19, who had been bullied since he was five, was found guilty of manslaughter after admitting battering Ben Williams, one of his tormentors, to death with a pool cue.

Kimpton, who was cleared by a jury of murdering his 17-year-old victim, told the court he was teased because he 'was fat, had thick glasses, big ears and goofy teeth'. A classmate who also gave evidence, admitted that Kimpton had been subjected to a relentless campaign of bullying: 'If we were bored and there was nothing to do we would make fun of Tommy,' said 19-year-old Charlotte Parton.

Then last Thursday, the day after Kimpton was sentenced to two years, 15-year-old Natashia Jackman was stabbed five times with a pair of scissors by a gang of bullies while she waited in the school lunch queue, suffering wounds to her eye, chest and back, and narrowly avoiding sustaining lasting damage to her sight.

The attack, her father claimed, was the third serious incidence of bullying his daughter had suffered at the hands of pupils at Collingwood College in Surrey, although he insisted that the violence had re-occurred despite the school's best efforts to fulfil its anti- bullying policy.

Although there have been extreme examples of bullying at the college in the past - in 1994, a 13-year-old girl was knifed by an older student after being lured into a school toilet - the local MP came forward yesterday to blame the attack on an endemic problem of bullying throughout society.

'It is not right to single out specific schools,' said Michael Gove, the Conservative MP for Surrey Heath. 'There is bullying across the country.'

This is the very point which Aynsley-Green passionately believes needs to be recognised and tackled. 'I have no doubt that children are being bought up in a society where violence is the norm,' he said.

'I include in this the violence on television, in the workplace and in the home. Violence is part of our contemporary culture, where it is so prevalent that it largely goes unremarked,' he added. 'My first plea in my new post is for adults to look in the mirror before they start castigating children for bullying behaviour.'

A report by the TUC last week supports his claims. The study called for tougher laws to protect staff from intimidation and punish bullies, with the union claiming that two million people were bullied at work over the past six months, often by managers.

Bullying, the report found, accounted for the loss of about 18 million working days each year, with employees going sick or changing jobs to escape humiliation. About 75 per cent of the bullying was perpetrated, researchers found, by managers or supervisors.

'The long-term pain for victims is incalculable, said Aynsley-Green. 'I want to see the treatment of bullying mainstreamed in schools so by the time children become adults, they know how to cope with it and defeat it.'

But Aynsley-Green, a former national clinical director for children and chairman of the Department of Health's children's task force, who has also been professor of child health at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the Institute of Child Health, University College London, has a long road to travel to achieve his ambition, according to the children's charity Childline.

Bullying in schools is getting worse, the charity revealed last month, claiming it had received thousands more calls about the issue in the year to October than in the whole of 2004.

According to Childline, the fact that seven out of 10 bullying incidents take place on school premises, a level that has stayed constant in recent years, is proof that government campaigns have failed.

While refusing to criticise the policymakers with whom he will be working closely, Aynsley-Green is circumspect in his opinion of their successes.

'There is much that I admire in the way of government policy and I want to pay tribute to a lot of extremely good work going on in schools,' he says carefully. 'But from what children are telling me, there is still a lot of denial about the existence, severity and effect of bullying in schools.

'It is not going too far to say many schools and teachers are still in a state of denial about this issue. There simply isn't enough genuine awareness of the problem in the minds of adults,' he said.

When Amy Hewitt, a 16-year-old student in Leicester who was bullied from the age of nine to 12, found the courage to tell her teachers she was being bullied, she was devastated to realise she was not believed.

'The bullying was emotional, verbal and very subtle, which meant it didn't happen in the manner or in the places where teachers could have seen it,' said Hewitt, who won a Diana Award last year for her work on the development of an anti-bullying support scheme that has been credited with reducing incidents across schools and colleges in Leicester by 10 per cent.

'But it was devastating none the less,' she added. 'I was desperate. I eventually believed the awful, personal things that were being said to me and couldn't imagine a time in my life when I would have friends and live a happy life.'

Hewitt eventually moved schools and found new friends, but for other victims the impact of bullying has had permanent impacts.

As part of the launch of Anti-Bullying Week on 21 November, Aynsley-Green has collated eight accounts of bullying from children to whom he has spoken. These stories have been put into a booklet containing information and advice for teachers that will be distributed to every school in England.

'I am 11 years old and a carer,' said one young girl. 'A girl had been bullying me for months. She shouted and swore at teachers, and when they talked to her about the bullying she denied it. She ruled the whole year.

'They punished her and threatened to exclude her but it made no difference, then the bullying spread to our street because she started spreading rumours that got all my friends to gang up on me. I used to rollerskate or swim but now I just want to stay home. I don't do any after-school activities. It all got too much. I just wanted it to stop. I felt like I was screaming for help for years but that no one could hear me,' she added.

Even when schools take incidents seriously, Aynsley-Green found that children said their anti-bullying policies often made things worse. 'From talking to teachers, I have found that they are often very unhappy about what they are expected to do about bullying,' he said. 'There is often a lot of theory about what they should do but not much reality in how to implement it.'

One young boy told Aynsley-Green how, when he eventually reported his bullies to his teachers, their response was to move him to a new form group.

'But because I was the only one changing my group, everyone wanted to know why and then a couple of kids from the old form spoke to kids in my new form, and it all started again,' he said.

'The bullying happened everywhere. At swimming they'd hold me under the water until I thought I was going to drown, then let me go as I was going limp. The PE teachers didn't seem to care. At break I'd sit in front of the security camera and pray they were watching [but] the school was on two sites and the path between the sites was dark, dingy and overgrown, and I was constantly pushed into the ditch, muddy, wet and upset.'

In the end, the young teenager moved to a school with a successful anti-bullying policy. 'When I first got there I was weak and feeble and felt completely washed out after what had happened to me for years,' he said.

'The hardest part was getting my confidence back around my home but, finally, I am not scared any more.'

Aynsley-Green accepts there is not a 'one-size-fits-all' answer to the issue but among the ideas he is considering is making schools give a termly questionnaire on bullying to every child from the first year of primary education upwards, then asking Ofsted to judge schools on the responses.

'I will expose this problem relentlessly and fearlessly, and confront the adult world with the views of young people,' he pledged. 'I will influence public, parental and political opinion and engage with the government in scrutiny of their decisions.

'By the new year, I will be up to speed and will be focusing on exposing schools and pupils' experiences of bullying when they are under their care,' he added. 'I am going to engage seriously with the issues that children tell me impact on them and I am going to make the adult world listen.'

amelia.hill@observer.co.uk

www.childrenscommissioner.org Explains Children's Commissioner's role. Policy and information links.


www.childline.org.uk Free helpline for children and young people who can also call 0800 1111 night or day.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Research on children in COPMI families - new report

New Report - Research on children at risk in families affected by parental mental illness

Research report on children at risk in families affected by parental mental illness - November 2005
VicHealth commissioned this research to determine the extent and distribution of children and young people in families affected by parental mental illness. It is anticipated the findings of this investigation will assist in planning the development of a state wide approach to responding to the needs of these children and young people.
File available at www.vichealth.vic.gov.au/copmi

Fun focused program for UK youth

Mental health: Fun on their minds
By - 16/11/05
A project in Stockport is helping young people with mental health problems to take part in regular youth activities. Andy Hillier finds out how it works

Fifteen-year-old Brian would never have dreamed of going to a youth club under normal circumstances. He suffers from a rare condition called body dysmorphia that means he is excessively worried about his appearance and doesn't like going out in public.
"In his mind, he views himself as ugly and deformed," says Laurie Carefoot, development worker at the Sound Minds project in Stockport. "He thinks he's overweight and that everyone's looking at him."

Brian is one of eight young people currently attending Sound Minds, a youth group for 13- to 16-year-olds living in Stockport who are experiencing mental health difficulties.

Set up last year, the project is run by Stockport Youth Service and is funded through contributions from the community child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) programme. The scheme provides young people with the chance to take part in a range of regular youth activities such as outings to theme parks, outdoor education trips, as well as arts and environmental work, music, drama and photography sessions. "They get to do the kind of things other young people do," says Carefoot.

Full article at http://www.ypnmagazine.com/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=full_news&ID=8833

Nurses can reduce waiting lists (Ireland)

(Irishhealth.com) Specialist nurses can help reduce waiting lists for treatment by child and adolescent mental health services, a conference in Dublin was told today.

According to Gordon Lynch, clinical nurse specialist in the HSE's south western area a year-long waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services in Kildare has been reduced to less than four weeks through the use of advanced nursing skills to review all referrals to the service.

Mr Lynch told the annual conference for the professional development of nursing and midwifery that the problem with the waiting list was not just the frustration of parents waiting a year for services.

"The problem was that the behaviours causing the difficulties were not being addressed at the right time; all of which led to low staff morale."

However a new system proposed by the nurses radically cut waiting times.

"Because nurses and midwives deliver the majority of direct client/patient care in Ireland, they're in a unique position to spot problems and propose creative solutions," said Yvonne O'Shea, Chief Executive Officer of the National Council for the Professional Development of Nursing and Midwifery.

She said nurses and midwives were doing this, whether in relation to streamlining services for elderly people or developing sensitive responses to bereavement and loss.

View article at http://www.irishhealth.com/?level=4&id=8501

The Case for National Investment in Early Childhood

By: Graham Vimpani
16 November 2005

Four years ago, the Prime Minister appointed Larry Anthony Australia's first ever Minister for Children. Under his leadership, a great deal of work was done in consultation with the states and territories to develop the framework for a National Agenda for Early Childhood (NAEC). But now, 12 months after the Minister lost his seat, there is no longer a specially designated Minister for Children and hence no one to champion the cause. Although the Communities for Children initiative of the Stronger Families and Communities Strategy has a strong focus on supporting families with young children in around 43 struggling communities, the Early Childhood Agenda is no longer listed on the home page of the Department's website and the NAEC page hasn't been updated in three months. This, along with the Treasury's failure to include any reference to the importance of early childhood investment or care in its Intergenerational Report in 2002, is of great concern - this is despite the Australian government's substantial investment in supporting child care!

Full article or download as PDF at http://www.newmatilda.com/policytoolkit/policydetail.asp?PolicyID=215


Resources

New - International Research Journal CPH

The new web based International Research Journal CPH is peer reviewed and registered with Department of Education, Science and Training. The editor would be happy to receive articles and papers from AICAFMHA members/subscribers. The journal is free to view and no memberships or financial commitments are required for readers.

Further information can be found on; http://www.cphjournal.com/

Stigmatization of Mental Illness in Children and Families

The Stigmatization of Mental Illness in Children and Families (DataTrends: October 2005)

Addressing the stigma that surrounds mental illness is an ongoing challenge. This article reviews theory and research on stigma and mental health, with a focus on the stigmatization of mental illness in the family. A future research agenda and recommendations for stigma reduction are also discussed.

Article #124 available at http://www.rtc.pdx.edu/pgDataTrends2005.shtml