Nick Child - The Real Ben
Nick Child is the creator of forallthat.com and the author of most of it
IN SUMMARY
Born in India in 1948, eldest of four children of a Methodist manse in the united Church of South India, my life was rather dispersed through moves of home and boarding school in India and Southern England, until I emerged apparently unscathed to do medicine at Edinburgh University. Taking the first opportunity to stay in one place and get a life, it has taken me a few more decades to achieve this.
Personally I have benefited from family life and from settling in one place, and (since 1973) one house and community in Portobello, 'Edinburgh's Seaside'. Both of us have been active in the community, notably involved in producing a community newspaper in our house. Maureen is now (unexpectedly until it happened) an effective and dedicated local politician, helping to bring green, open, and collaborative ways to what has been the more usual political ways!
Our two grown up sons moved out but stayed in Edinburgh and, to our delight, moved even closer with their partners, and what's more, they started having grandchildren for us!
Professionally, after training in medicine, psychiatry and child psychiatry, I benefited from team life at my work between 1981 and 2003, an hour's commute away in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, as a consultant child and family psychiatrist. The hour's journey helped provide space for thinking and in many ways helped me to get a life; it has provided my first real pals at work and even sharing a beer with commuter pals on Friday nights.
For me, getting a life meant commuting by public transport (before I retired from the NHS in April 2003) and discovering a passion for all kinds of social dancing before specialising in salsa! I have spent rather more time dancing and running internet lists for salsa networks than for this more professional stuff.
Retirement opened up a whole new world again! I still work part-time as a Family Therapist in the small team at Couple Counselling Lothian! I am slowly working through the long list of other things I wanted to retire to do - but grandchildren have been a delightful surprise top priority!
WHAT ELSE?
Professionally, in Motherwell, I played a determined part in developing a NHS multi-disciplinary egalitarian community-oriented child and adolescent mental health service (CAMHS) in the 'peripheries of excellence'. It may have looked much like many other CAMHS, but we had reason to believe we applied skilled ordinariness and a demystified family-systems approach to an extraordinary degree. I have written prolifically on the way to this integrating de-construction - or more accurately - re-construction of the established disciplines of psychiatry, child psychiatry, and other CAMH disciplines, notably social work, psychodynamic psychotherapies, and family therapy. For All That publishes this NHS-based writing and related articles.
The team developed in-house guidelines and ways of capturing what is so basic and taken for granted that it is not written about. It is also unfortunately often forgotten. For professionals and public alike, this is made worse by the established and powerful public promotion of mystifying structures, ideas and language.
My life can be seen as a sustained career of searching for, engaging respectfully with parent bodies, and then (still respectfully) demystifying what I find. It has also been a search for joy in life, first in helping others to find it (which is an obvious if unusual view of what working in mental health services is about), then helping myself do so. So my professional and personal lives have converged and crossed over.
This site is the publication of much of my and our work around CFC Motherwell. My writing is otherwise rather scattered, often written in response to other articles, difficult to access as the integrated system that it is, and many people have asked to get at it. It is hard to compose it into a book. This website is the answer!
