Introduction

This chapter considers the development of a conceptual framework modelled on Caplanian Community Mental Health principles, an approach which offers a readily understandable theoretical basis for early support for children and families undergoing stressful critical life experiences. It also underlies my argument for a coordinated network of preventive services for children and young people facing serious parental conflict and separation. In this respect, in subsequent chapters I shall concentrate first on the role of schools as ‘first responders’ (although this could apply equally to GPs and primary healthcare teams which are readily accessible, non-stigmatising and part of children's everyday lives). Second, I shall look at the ‘backup’ preventive support services of the family justice system when parental conflict and separation result in potential litigation under the Child Arrangements Programme (CAP) (see Chapter Ten).

As mentioned in the Introduction to Part II of this book, my aim is to revive interest in preventive social psychiatry, and what became known in the 1960s and 1970s as the crisis model of mental health and the related practice of crisis intervention. In my opinion, this school of thought largely complements more recent empirical findings from the field of developmental psychology, advanced particularly in the United Kingdom by Professor Sir Michael Rutter and Professor Gordon Harold, to which I referred in Chapter Three.

Both theoretical approaches are concerned with reducing risk to children's mental health and with promoting the emotional resilience and social wellbeing of those affected by parental conflict and separation. Both take into account stressors, internal as well as external, which can seriously impact on a family's overall mental health and social functioning. Even so, I find it puzzling that, with the exception of an important paper concerning prevention by Caroline and Philip Cowan, little reference is made to the obvious complementarity between these two important schools of thought – at least in the professional literature that I have considered. I suspect one reason for this is the well-known tendencies for professionals in various areas of specialist knowledge to build defensive ‘silos’ to protect their professional expertise and status in a competitive world – a point to which I shall return when considering interprofessional collaboration and training in the concluding chapters (Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen) of this book.