High integrity mental health services for children: focusing on the person, not the problem

Around 1 in 10 children and young people worldwide have mental health difficulties that substantially affect their lives. Even in high income countries only a small minority of these people access specialist support, which has led to demands for more mental health specialists.1 We support these calls but think that focusing exclusively on the need for more healthcare professionals is not enough. We need to move away from approaches led by professionals that focus on problems towards care that is person centred and focused on progress. In England some specialist provision is available from the NHS—publicly funded, free at the point of access—but the focus is increasingly on schools as key locations for provision (as is the case in many other high income countries), and on developing resilience in the community (as is the focus in many low and middle income countries). We can learn from the situation in England (box 1) as well as emerging international examples (box 2)