For children and young people whose difficulties are more severe or have developed over a longer time and have become more complex, perhaps manifesting in symptoms of complex trauma, long-term or intensive treatment can be a valuable option if time and resources allow. Long-term and intensive psychotherapy is a highly specialist treatment and a thorough assessment is always completed before a plan of work is agreed.
What is long-term psychotherapy?
Long-term psychotherapy is a psychoanalytic mode of treatment that ordinarily lasts for at least one year.
Sessions are weekly. It is a treatment for children and young people with complex and severe mental health and emotional challenges which have a severe impact on their development and the capacity to manage social relationships and school life.
Short-term psychotherapy is sometimes not enough to address complex difficulties and enable a child’s emotional and developmental needs to be properly attended to. The regularity and frequency of sessions offers a containing structure for a child or young person. This in itself provides stability for children who have had disrupted and chaotic lives or who struggle with regulation and organisation.
What is intensive psychotherapy?
Intensive psychotherapy is when a child or young person is seen at least twice or three times a week. Development and well-being is continually reviewed and monitored.
The active involvement of parents and carers alongside a young child’s therapy is encouraged and sometimes a necessary component of long-term work. Parentwork appointments help to provide the necessary framework for understanding a child’s difficulties in the unique context of early experience, the child’s personality and family life. Intensive psychotherapy is offered to a small proportion of cases with the most intractable and severe difficulties for whom shorter or less intensive work would not facilitate sufficient engagement and change.
Intensive psychotherapy is considered when a weekly gap between sessions might be experienced as too long. For example some children and adolescents withdraw to help them to manage pain or anxiety. Disorganised attachment relationships or difficulties in self regulation may also be an indicator for intensive treatment.
Examples of presenting difficulties:
- social communication delays/deficits e.g. ASD attention,
- behavioural and impulsivity problems e.g. ADHD
- anxiety disorders
- severe depression
- suicidal ideation
- issues with identity
- eating problems
- sleeping problems
- risk taking and self harming behaviours
- sexualised behaviours
- aggression and violence
Trauma
Children or young people who have endured multiple adverse life experiences [ACEs] , for example children in families where more complex difficulties have arisen after there has been a bereavement or divorce, an accident, family illness, a parent with addictions, a parent with mental health difficulties – may also benefit from long-term treatment.
More information about Longer Term and Intensive Psychotherapy.