Socially excluded youth with mental health problems and co-occurring
difficulties (e.g. conduct disorder, family breakdown, homelessness,
substance use, exploitation, educational failure) attract the
involvement of multiple agencies. Poorly coordinated interventions often
multiply in the face of such problems, so that a young person or family
is approached by multiple workers from different agencies working
towards different goals and using different treatment models; these are
often overwhelming and may actually be experienced as aversive by the
young person or their family. Failure to provide effective help is
costly throughout life
This is the first book to describe Adaptive Mentalization-Based
Integrative Treatment (AMBIT). This is an approach to working with
people - particularly young people and young adults - whose lives are
often chaotic and risky, and whose problems are not limited to one
domain. In addition to mental health problems, they may have problems
with care arrangements, education or employment, exploitation, substance
misuse, offending behaviours, and gang affiliations; if these problems
are all occurring simultaneously, any progress in one area is easily
undermined by harms still occurring in another.
AMBIT has been designed by and for community teams from Mental Health,
Social Care, Youth work, or that may be purposefully
multi-disciplinary/multi-agency. It emphasises the need to strengthen
integration in the complex networks that tend to gather around such
clients, minimising the likelihood of an experience of care that is
aversive. AMBIT uses well evidenced 'Mentalization-based' approaches,
that are at their core integrative - drawing on recent advances in
neuroscience, psycho-analytic, social cognitive, and systemic "treatment
models".
