Clinicians’ use of attachment disorders and developmental trauma in CAMHS – a pilot study

Several ways of classifying children’s mental health disorders are popular amongst clinicians working with children and young people who are adopted or fostered, or who have experienced maltreatment and neglect, but these descriptions are not well characterised and do not lead to evidence-based treatments. This pilot project will investigate the occurrence of two popular characterizations of problems for these children and young people (attachment disorder and developmental trauma) and one related intervention approach which is often prescribed for these characterizations (developmental dyadic psychotherapy) to ascertain if they can be reliably detected in the mental health records