'Joined up working' at clinical and managerial levels: you can't have one without the other

Abstract

“Joined up working” has increasingly become a political and therapeutic issue and in practice can be a complex and difficult undertaking. In this article, I describe the work undertaken by a systemic family therapy team working within a Child and Adolescent Mental Health clinic alongside several other agencies. I outline how over a period of three years we worked with Jane, an adolescent girl with mental health problems, her father, and her step mother who was also described as suffering from severe mental health problems, to help them to live back together again, resulting in the revocation of a Care Order. I highlight how multi-agency/joined up working can address some of the different agendas of the agencies and the family members and describe how new narratives were created to bring about change. I suggest that the role of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health team as container and holder of the work, where anxieties can be managed, was crucial in terms of