During the interval of a recent concert by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Dr Dickon Bevington, Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist, gave a thought provoking, and topical talk:

The Importance of Human Contact today, about Mentalization, Attachment and Kindness.

About Dr Dickon Bevington:

Dr Bevington is the Medical Director at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families and a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS FT where he leads CASUS, an outreach service for complex substance using youth. He is also a Fellow of the Cambridge and Peterborough CLARHC, a collaboration based in Cambridge University dedicated to developing leadership and research in health and social care.

Dr Bevington’s consultant career started in adolescent in-patient psychiatry, but he now concentrates on developing and delivering innovative home-based or street-level out-reach interventions for complex, co-morbidly burdened young people who are socially excluded, using mentalization to underpin both the therapeutic and the organisational approach to this work. In this respect, together with Dr Peter Fuggle, he is the co-lead for the Adolescent Mentalization-Based Integrative Treatment (AMBIT) project.

Dr Bevington trains and lectures internationally on MBT and AMBIT, and has published a number of papers and chapters in the eld of mentalization and multimodal outreach approaches, most recently with Dr Fuggle. He is also co-author of “ What works for whom: a critical review of treatments for children and adolescents” which is a review of all treatment trials in the past 10-15 years across the world.

Take a look at the Anna Freud Centre website for more information about this field of Child Mental Health.

For a great resource for on-line learning, click on link below: https://www.annafreud.org/mental-health-professionals/anna-freud-learning-network/