Out of time: adolescents and those who wait for them

Abstract

This paper draws on the scholarship of an inter-disciplinary project about time and waiting in healthcare to explore questions of urgency and risk in clinical work with depressed and suicidal young people, and how the feeling of being compelled to act can be meaningfully explored from a psychoanalytic perspective. The paper examines adolescence as both a time of inherent crisis and one in which self-harm and suicidal ideation represent particular challenges. It then considers Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service practice in relation to acute mental health crisis, and in the context of the chronic crisis affecting the UK National Health Service. Considering both formal psychoanalytic psychotherapy and the contribution of psychoanalytic thinking to multidisciplinary discussions and emergency work in CAMHS, the author then considers the anticipatory anxieties that affect such work, and the particular role of psychoanalytic thinking for young people burdened by suicidal ideation and the professionals caring for them.