Eilis Kennedy

• Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust

Background: Conduct problems are a range of disruptive behaviours in childhood that are associated with long-term adverse outcomes in adolescence and adulthood, including antisocial behaviour, substance misuse, and poor academic achievement. Children with conduct problems can vary according to age of onset, comorbidities, and environmental factors...

The new WHO recommendations for the care of preterm or low birthweight infants, as commented on by Gary Darmstadt and colleagues, are to be commended. In particular, the recommendation that kangaroo mother care should be routinely started soon after birth and the emphasis on the centrality of family support and involvement in care should help facil...

An up-to-date and accurate picture of the evidence on the impact of poverty is a necessary element of the debate about the future direction of children’s social care services internationally. The purpose of this paper is to update evidence about the relationship between poverty and child abuse and neglect (CAN) published since a previous report in...

Over 30% of children in England live in poverty. According to the Governor of the Bank of England, this figure is likely to worsen, as the current cost-of-living crisis impedes families from being able to buy essential items. For example, 2·6 million children were food insecure in April, 2022, and the Trussell Trust supplied over 2 million emergenc...

Despite a rich theoretical and clinical history, psychodynamic child and adolescent psychotherapy has been slow to engage in the empirical assessment of its effectiveness. This systematic review aims to provide a narrative synthesis of the evidence base for psychodynamic therapy with children and adolescents. Building on two earlier systematic revi...

This is a protocol for a Cochrane Review (Intervention). The objectives are as follows: To assess the effects of personalised, psychosocial interventions for subgroups of children with conduct problems.

While the evidence base for psychodynamic therapy with adults is now quite substantial, there is still a lack of research evaluating the effectiveness of psychodynamic therapies with children and young people. Those studies that have been carried out are also not widely known in the field. To help address the second point, in 2011, we carried out a...

This chapter focuses on psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and adolescents presenting with a range of clinical problems. The child's play and behaviour are therefore used by the therapist to understand the child's inner world. The evidence base for psychodynamic child psychotherapy is somewhat limited as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) ha...

A recent Cochrane Review of psychological therapies and antidepressants for depression in children and adolescents concludes ‘on the basis of the available evidence, we do not know whether psychological therapy, antidepressant medication or a combination of the two is most effective to treat depressive disorders in children and adolescents’ (Cox et...

Social domains are classes of interpersonal processes each with distinct procedural rules underpinning mutual understanding, emotion regulation and action. We describe the features of three domains of family life – safety, attachment and discipline/expectation – and contrast them with exploratory processes in terms of the emotions expressed, the ro...

Background Childhood-onset schizophrenia is onset prior to the age of 13 years. Although rare, people who suffer from schizophrenia at an early age appear to have a severe form of the illness with poor long-term prognosis. Antipsychotic medication is one way of managing this serious mental illness. Aims/objectives To examine the effects of antipsy...

For many years psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapies have been considered to lack a credible evidence-base and have consistently failed to appear in lists of 'empirically supported treatments'. This study systematically reviews the research evaluating the efficacy and effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy for children and young people....

Psychotherapeutic approaches to working with children, informed by a psychodynamic model have developed over many years. More recently this work has benefited from insights gained from developmental psychology, neuroscience and clinical research. The current evidence base for psychodynamic child psychotherapy is somewhat limited but the findings fr...

Background: Childhood-onset schizophrenia is schizophrenia with onset prior to the age of 13 years. Although it is rare, people who suffer from schizophrenia at an early age appear to have a clinically severe form of the illness with poor long-term prognosis. Antipsychotic medication is one way of managing this rare but serious mental illness. Obje...

Childhood-onset schizophrenia is schizophrenia with onset prior to the age of 13 years. Although it is rare, people who suffer from schizophrenia at an early age appear to have a clinically severe form of the illness with poor long-term prognosis. Antipsychotic medication is one way of managing this rare but serious mental illness. To examine the e...

The great majority of children living in foster or residential care have been abused and neglected. Mental health problems are common and the nature of these problems may be rooted in early attachment relationships. The carers of 82 children in care in Scotland and 125 children from local schools completed questionnaires on mental health problems i...

Story stem measures allow the assessment of children's representations of relationship functioning, but are expensive and time-consuming to administer. We developed a computerized story stem measure which does not require specific training for administrators and which allows the child to produce their own animated, narrated story completion. This p...

Risperidone is one of the 'new generation' antipsychotics. As well as its reputed tendency to cause fewer movement disorders than the older drugs such as chlorpromazine and haloperidol, it is claimed that risperidone may improve negative symptoms. To evaluate the effects of risperidone for schizophrenia in comparison to 'conventional' neuroleptic d...