Our Initial Assessments (by CAMHS experienced therapists) will support you to understand the needs of your child and which services or interventions may be helpful. E.g. further assessment, relevant therapies, or other areas of support. We aim to provide you with prompt and responsive service to avoid the common delays in accessing appropriate services for young people. Where possible, we will quote for additional services, which can serve as a guide for you when purchasing services from us or from another provider.

What to expect from an initial Assessment

We will offer an assessment soon after we receive your signed agreement and the background information we request. To speed up your start date, send your scanned signed agreement and password protected background information to wellbeing@apricotcentre.co.uk

• Providing us with signed consent for sharing information can help us to move faster on an assessment. We will generally revisit the consent arrangements as part of the assessment.

• The practitioner will prepare for the assessment by reading relevant background information and history.

• Face-to-face Assessment will include up to 3 hours of meetings with the child, parent/s/carer/s, social workers, teachers, or other relevant adults.

• The practitioner will then write an assessment report and make this available to the referrer. Copies can also be posted to other people where consent has been given.

We offer a variety of assessments to assess the needs and capabilities of children and families:

Initial Assessments - Undertaken by CAMHS experienced therapists, these assessments will support you to understand the needs of your child and which services of interventions are likely to be helpful. We aim to provide you with a prompt and responsive service to avoid the common delays in accessing appropriate services for young people. We can sometimes quote for additional services which can serve as a guide for you when purchasing services from us or from another provider.

Psychiatric Assessments - Our psychiatrists can undertake full psychiatric assessments or diagnostic assessments. We can sometimes offer attachment assessments based upon the School Attachment Interview or the Care Index. For more information, see Psychiatric Clinics.

Psychological Assessments - Complex Mental Health Assessments are tailored to specific questions needing to be answered. This means we put together a highly individualised package for each child. Our clinical psychologists can assess various mental health conditions, attachment and developmental trauma, social, cognitive, and learning disabilities to help guide subsequent support. These assessments:

• Help enhance our understanding of a child or young person

• Find out what their strengths and difficulties are.

• Explore how they relate to other people.

• Determine

For these assessments to be robust, we draw from a variety of sources, including talking with parents, carers, professionals, and the young people themselves. We also use standardised psychometric tests to ensure we are reliable in our assessments. More detail about what a psychologist can offer can be found under Psychology.

Psychiatric Clinic - We hold monthly clinics in East Anglia. A psychiatrist can undertake a full assessment with follow-up reviews to monitor mental health difficulties and medication. Visit our clinic page for more information.

‘The Edge of Potential’ is an important concept in Process Oriented Psychology (developed by Dr Arnold Mindell). At our ‘Edges’ there is often disturbance, but there is also diversity and potential. Processwork finds a young person’s potential within that disturbance. On a surface level, what may appear as the problem may actually contain the solution. Processwork encourages us to reflect on our behaviours and anxieties as if they are maps to our development. When tuning in to our ‘disturbances’, we allow them to inform us of our needs to help us grow.

Process oriented psychology/psychotherapy works with feedback and awareness. Feedback is fundamental to parent/child attunement which is central to how a child learns about themselves and the world around them. Following feedback means that interventions flow from the way children and families behave and communicate from moment to moment. The awareness of feedback can help parents and children deal with complex feelings and experiences.

Process oriented therapy can be applied across a wide range of child and family experiences, from parent/child attunement, to supporting children and young people in their development and dealing with transitions, conflicts, and discovering how to live to their full potential. This work has been applied to bullying, abuse and trauma, leadership and empowerment. Process oriented therapy has been applied to working with anger, violence, and many other health difficulties.

Process Oriented Child Psychotherapy can help children, teenagers, parents/carers, and families with challenges including:

• Childhood trauma (also parental trauma)

• Attachment difficulties

• Violence and rage

• Individuation and autonomy

• Mental health difficulties

• Nightmares and sleep difficulties

• Somatic symptoms with a psychological basis

• Supporting parents, carers (and corporate parents)

• Process Oriented Family Work/Therapy

• Complex difficulties associated with adoption, care, or other family dynamics

• Diversity issues - non goal-oriented approaches around gender and sexual-orientation, issues with identity, xenophobia and marginalisation of many kinds

• Rank and power - a particular interest in raising awareness around rank/power issues for children and families

How It Works

In whatever ways young people are behaving, they are communicating. Not just through their voice, but through their behaviours. These behaviours are the child’s deeper needs. Processwork involves attuning to the needs of a young person and how these are expressed through their signals and behaviours. The aim is to engage with the young person in ways which give ‘positive feedback’ or resonate positively with who they are. Particularly when they have had bad experiences or their development has been disrupted, some children don’t yet know what they think or feel, and through bringing awareness and curiosity to their experiences, and helping parents, teachers, and cared to do so also, a child can begin to become warmer and more interested in themselves and who they are.

The aim is to follow the young person’s (or family’s) process; helping them to live and express their nature like a plant, rather than to fix them or to make them fit into our own expectations. But this is also about helping the young person to live a successful life in a world of influences and pressures. Environments and the circle of relationships around children are also really important. Therefore, we approach peer relationships, families, schools, and professional services in a similar way, bringing awareness to how we communicate and interact as this has an impact on children and young people.

The awareness of the subtleties of rank and power can really help children to discover their own powers and become more aware of using them effectively. For example, physical power, the power of emotions, the social rank and power of teachers and parents, and also the powers that young people have in relations to adults. Even playfulness and creativity are important powers. Unconscious power can be toxic, but powers of all kinds when used with awareness can enhance children’s lives and the communities they live in.

Parents, carers, and corporate parents - In fact, any adult may be important in a child’s life, modelling and respectfully interacting with children. Validating the child’s experience, noticing the child’s capabilities and holding boundaries with a respectful use of power and good communication. Children and young people dealing with particularly painful or disturbing experiences may often externalise their conflicts upon those closest to them. Here, there is an enhanced parental role of noticing when this is happening and ‘digesting’ or ‘processing’ the difficulty such that it can be given back to the child in a digestible form.

Process Oriented Child Psychotherapy offers particular skills and innerwork for parents to pick up this unique responsibility for those they care for, but also for parents and carers to look after themselves, their body, feelings, imagination, and common sense. Processwork helps a child to follow their own inner feedback, and to learn to trust themselves. At the same time, processwork deals with inner barriers and blocks *Process Oriented Psychology was developed by Arnold Mindell and international colleagues.

DDP is a therapy, parenting approach and model for practice that uses what we know about attachment and developmental trauma to help children and families with their relationships. 

DDP specifically aims to help parents or caregivers and their child make deeper emotional connections with each other. DDP is a type of therapy where you will be seen with your child.

This therapy aims to work out whether and how your child’s development might have been affected and how you might be able to help your child’s development progress

Art therapy is a psychotherapy that uses the creative potential in children and teenagers to help them through the more difficult times in their lives.

Who Art Therapy Can Help

Art Therapy is a powerful and usually effective way of working with young people who have experiences or continue to experience hardship - whether historically they have experienced trauma, abuse, or neglect, or presently are experiencing a divorce, bereavement, bullying, arrival of a new sibling etc. Whatever it is that may be difficult to put into words, or even unimaginable in spoken language, they can be expressed through the artwork.

Art therapy can be used to assist children and teenagers with a number of issues including:

• Treating mental disorders such as schizophrenia or depression

• Helping children understand and deal with physical disabilities

• Supporting children with developmental difficulties or trauma

• Understanding and treating behavioural problems such as ADHD and ADD

• Living with Learning Disabilities

• Treating eating disorder and phobias

How It Works

Children are naturally creative, and it is usually easier for them to draw a picture as opposed to answering questions directly. They may be reluctant or hostile about discussing certain topics. Creating artwork is a non-threatening avenue that allows children to tackle tough issues in creative ways. Talking to the children about their drawings/painting can provide therapists with the opening they need to get at the heart of the problems affecting their young patients.

Teenagers are often more self-conscious about image-making and may be reluctant to openly express themselves at first. Tactile materials - from executive toys to stress relieving gadgets - are provided. These can support them to simply hang out, relax, and eventually start playing and creating. In the Art Therapy room, image-making can be used differently depending on the changing needs of the young person. Art has a natural cathartic element, which by its very making can allow a release from pent-up and/or repressed emotions. Art also has a symbolic language; with the help of the therapist, the young person can decipher the meaning of the picture and discusses the underlying thoughts/feelings that inspired the artwork. The Art Therapy room is a world to escape into, away from the overwhelming stresses that daily living may entail.

Getting Started

Firstly, we like to meet parents/cares, and where necessary, professionals - to discuss the background to the referral. Thereafter we suggest an initial assessment of 3 Art Therapy sessions with the young person. In the third session, both the therapists and the young person discuss whether to continue working together. If they agree to continue working together then they agree to meet weekly for a number of months (usually 3 months), after which they review their work together and extend the contract or close as required. Whilst the young person is undertaking therapy, the therapist meets monthly (ideally) with the parent/s/carer/s and may liaise with professionals and schools.

Art therapy reports are written on request for professional meetings, reviews, and discharge.

Music Therapy is an established psychological clinical intervention, delivered by HCPC registered music therapists to help people whose lives have been affected by injury, illness or disability through supporting their psychological, emotional, cognitive, physical, communicative and social needs.

Music Therapists draw upon the innate qualities of music to support people of all ages and abilities and at all stages of life; from helping newborn babies develop healthy bonds with their parents, to offering vital, sensitive and compassionate palliative care at the end of life. 

Central to how Music Therapy works is the therapeutic relationship that is established and developed, through engagement in live musical interaction and play between a therapist and client. A wide range of musical styles and instruments can be used, including the voice, and the music is often improvised. Using music in this way enables clients to create their own unique musical language in which to explore and connect with the world and express themselves.

Dramatherapy is a unique form of psychotherapy, delivered by HCPC registered dramatherapists to support people with their social, emotional mental health needs.

Dramatherapy has as its main focus the intentional use of healing aspects of drama and theatre as the therapeutic process. It is a method of working and playing that uses action methods to facilitate creativity, imagination, learning, insight and growth. Dramatherapy can follow the childhood development milestones with a unique way of working which is linked to each stage, this is known as embodiment, projection and role (EPR, Jennings).

Dramatherapy utilises all aspects of drama and theatre to support clients. These can be mask and puppetry work, scenes and roles plays, sensory and creative play.

Therapeutic Life Story Work supports young people who have had challenging early beginnings, to resolve trauma, find meaning and to develop secure attachments with their adoptive parents or carers.

Children and young people are able to gain a deeper understanding of their personal history and ‘life story’’, developing an awareness of how these experiences and stories impact their present lives. The process aims to support the young person to reflect on their past, including difficult aspects such as; trauma, loss, abuse and neglect, to develop compassion towards themselves so that they move on with meaning and purpose, and make any needed changes. For adolescents Therapeutic Life Story Work helps to cultivate open and honest conversations with adoptive parents/carers, and social workers, and can make secretive contact with birth parents or family less likely. 

Our TLSW practitioners are skilled wellbeing practitioners who have been additionally trained in therapeutic life story work certificated by the Family Futures Consortium or other professional training organisations. A good understanding of child development, developmental trauma and attachment underlies our practice.

Ecotherapy as is the name given to a wide range of treatment programmes which aim to improve your mental and physical wellbeing through doing outdoor activities in nature. 

Connecting with nature in this way can have lots of positive health benefits. For example, ecotherapy can help you manage an existing mental health problem, and could help prevent future periods of ill health, such as an episode of depression.​

Ecotherapy can take place in both rural and urban settings, including parks, gardens, farms and woodlands. It involves varying amounts of physical activity, depending on the type of programme. It can include activities that focus on

• working in nature, such as a conservation project, gardening or farming

• experiencing nature, such as enjoying the views on a walk or cycling through woodland.

We help young people reconnect to themselves and society through being in nature and mentoring, Our mentoring support programme harnesses the  positive impact of nature on personal and social well being, whilst fully supporting young people to develop resilience and resources to start to help turn their lives around.