Support for children and adolescents

The Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy team have a core psychoanalytic training and can provide assessments, brief, and long-term therapeutic help for a variety of emotional and psychological problems. As well as helping individuals and families, the Psychotherapy team also provide consultations to professionals, supervision, training, and organising of specialist conferences.

We help children and young people up to the age of 25, with:

• Trauma and attachment related difficulties

• Depression and low mood

• Challenging behaviour

Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists work in an age-appropriate way, which can mean communicating through play, as well as words with younger children. By working with their family or care unit, talking, or playing, child and adolescent psychotherapists can help young people understand themselves better and make sense of their difficulties. Through this therapeutic process children and young people can start to recognise and manage their emotions better, make and sustain relationships that are good for them, improve their behaviour and lessen distress and emotional pain.

The Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Team (CPS) is here to help children and young people up to the age of 25 (in our team we work with 4-25).

Psychotherapists are trained to think about emotional responses, behaviour, and play, whilst naming feelings and carefully attending to what a young person says. This therapeutic process can help children and young people who are feeling troubled by anxiety or other complex feelings such as aggression, sadness, anxiety, depression, and hyperactivity. The therapist’s is non-judgemental and curious helping to put into words what has been communicated through play, behaviour, and verbal expression. Having a trained professional to talk to can help to make sense of some of these complex emotions and behaviour that are linked to anxiety and pain.

Please use our referrals form.

We offer Short Term Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (STPP) for adolescents as young as 12 who are suffering from depression and low mood.

This is a time-limited, evidence-based model of psychoanalytic psychotherapy consisting of twenty-eight weekly sessions for the adolescent patient and seven sessions for parents or carers.

Read the STPP information leaflet for young people

Read the STPP information leaflet for parents and carers

Consultation and specialist supervision can be tailor-made for your team, once discussed, and costed by the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy Team (CPS). Our supervision groups bring together key psychodynamic principles, knowledge of developmental and attachment theory, as well as a mentalising framework. This approach is designed to increase in depth understanding and aid practitioners working with children, young people, and families. It is a flexible approach for multi professional groups working in a range of settings. Participants will be invited to record process notes, think of a developmental history and formulation of the current difficulty. This model of consultation and supervision can be used for work in different settings.

Contact us - referrals@annafreud.org