Integrated Networks in Child and Youth Mental Health: A Challenging Role Transformation for Child Psychiatrists and Allied Mental Health Professionals?

Mental health interventions for children and adolescents mobilize a diversity of professionals. Child psychia-trists, psychologists and psychotherapists have an informal tradition of working in partnership with community-based professionals such as social workers, school professionals and community organization leaders, the latter of whom are often in close contact with children and youth in their homes, schools, and communities. Collaborative models of mental health care (also sometimes called shared care mod-els), where professionals work in mutually defined partner-ships and where service delivery is specifically organized into an integrated network of services, are increasingly be-ing developed and put at the forefront of clinical service delivery. Both the relative lack of specialized resources in mental health care as well as an increasing recognition of the helpful role that a well-organized, wide support and in-tervention network can play in improving a child and fam-ily’s well-being appear to be propelling the policy shifts that are promoting collaborative care models as a means of meeting a population’s mental health care needs. Primary care services have been identified as key players in many collaborative care models as a means of increas-ing accessibility to mental health care—as evidenced fo