What are my experiences as a Trainee Child Psychotherapist, setting up and facilitating a Work Discussion Group for clinical staff in a CAMHS setting.

ABSTRACT This study reports on my experience of setting up and facilitating a Work Discussion Group (WDG) offered to the clinical staff of a Crisis Service in a Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) setting. The research describes and analyses my experience of what it was like to offer a WDG in an established team that had had no provision of this kind previously. A qualitative methodology was used, with the method of data analysis being Reflective Thematic Analysis (RTA), to analyse four significant sessions. The first session was the initial enquiry meeting with the Crisis Team and their managers; three direct WDG weekly sessions over the six-month intervention were also sampled. Establishing a WDG in a CAMHS Team that already had a strong culture of its own was a complex but rewarding learning experience. The importance of letting experiential learning evolve in an intimate manner was essential and required curiosity to become alive in the WDG. In my task as a facilitator, I had to understand the Clinicians’ defensive behaviour and for the Clinicians to feel understood and held without me becoming defensive. My training offered me a Psychoanalytic backbone to support new thinking within the WDG and to survive the initial feeling of hostility and rivalry from the Clinicians and lesser so from within myself. The WDG became more relevant after it had become established as it initially struggled to find a meaningful space within the CAMHS Crisis Team. The propensity for splitting and re-enactments due in part to the nature of crisis work was understood by moving beyond looking for logical meaning to bringing in thinking based on unconscious processes to add meaning to the clinical material that was presented. This added to the authenticity of the experience when discussing clinical material during each WDG session. In my experience, the WDG became a dynamic and authentic experience for the Clinicians. In my role as the facilitator, I needed to hold an internal experience in my mind of what a WDG involved in order for me not to get pulled into the busy culture of the CAMHS Crisis Team. Keywords: CAMHS; crisis team; staff reflexive practice; psychoanalytic work discussion group