CAMHS Crisis: Too Late, Too Little
Why is CAMHS (Child & Adolescent Mental Health Services) failing families?
CAMHS is overwhelmed and underfunded. Children in crisis wait months (sometimes years!) for help. Many are denied access outright unless they’re actively suicidal. The bar for care is set cruelly high, and too many families are left to cope alone until it's too late. This collapse in mental health care hits disabled and neurodivergent children especially hard.
The average wait for a first appointment is 30–40 weeks. In many cases, families report waiting 1 to 2 years for full assessments, treatment plans, or follow-up therapy. These delays don’t just hurt- they derail education, support, and EHCP access.
Why Are Waiting Times So Long?
Over 200,000 children and young people are currently waiting for CAMHS support. Referrals to CAMHS rose 134% between 2019 and 2023- but staff numbers and funding haven’t kept up.
In many areas, children must be actively suicidal to even be seen. Emotional distress, anxiety, trauma, eating issues, or autistic burnout often don’t “qualify” for care... until it becomes a crisis.
A generation of post-pandemic children are now dealing with long-COVID anxiety, school refusal, grief, sensory overload, and unrecognised neurodivergence. But mental health budgets are being squeezed, and the pipeline for training new professionals is critically slow.
Who's Getting Left Behind?
Children with autism, ADHD, trauma or school-based anxiety are often refused support because they "don’t meet criteria." Unfortunately, CAMHS is often the only path to educational support (e.g. EHCPs). When this is blocked, everything collapses.
Families seeking diagnoses or help for neurodivergent children are routinely bounced between services and told their child is “too complex,” “not severe enough,” or “doesn’t meet the right criteria.”
This is part of a much bigger problem with diagnostic delays.
What needs to change?
✦ Fund the front line
CAMHS teams across the UK are underfunded, understaffed, and overwhelmed. Therapists are juggling impossible caseloads; some areas don’t even have dedicated crisis teams for under-18s. Proper investment in mental health shouldn’t be optional: it’s as essential as A&E.
We need more psychologists, therapists, crisis workers, and admin staff with specialist knowledge of autism, ADHD, trauma, and neurodiversity.
Ringfenced mental health funding should be protected from local authority cuts and actually reach frontline services.
✦ Stop rationing care
Right now, children are denied help unless they’re deemed “severe enough.” This gatekeeping forces families to wait until crisis; a deeply dangerous threshold to reach. Access to mental health care must be preventative, not reactive.
CAMHS must open its doors to children with chronic anxiety, PTSD, disordered eating, or autistic shutdowns... not just those in life-threatening situations.
✦ Set national wait time standards
There are no official maximum wait times for children’s mental health care. That’s why some kids are seen in weeks and others wait years.
The government must introduce binding national targets for access to CAMHS, with transparency from NHS trusts on their local figures. Children shouldn’t face a postcode lottery when it comes to survival.
What YOU can do right now
Petitions
Reform CAMHS & accept private diagnoses: Push for change that ensures families can use private assessments when public services fail them.
Review & reform CAMHS commissioning & funding: Demand proper investment, transparent access, and equitable support across regions.
Every signature matters. These petitions are a real way to amplify the message that change is overdue, justice is vital. And children don’t have time to wait.
Email your MP
This doesn't just affect SEND families. When children are failed by the system, the cost ripples out: local economies suffer, government budgets strain, and taxpayers foot the bill through increased benefits and crisis services.
If this is personal to you share your wait-time story and don't hold back. Petition-driven MP debates in the past have shown that this really does work. Use this quick MP email tool to call for reform.
Personal stories help them understand the reality beyond numbers.
Support Charities
YoungMinds, Mind, and Place2Be are leading charities pushing for improved youth mental health services, better support in schools, and real policy change.
They campaign, educate, and offer lifelines to families in crisis. Give them a look -and your support!- and help fuel the fight for better care.
Demand Transparency
Campaign for NHS trusts and councils to publish waitlists and crisis referral rejections.
Write to your MP asking them to demand transparency from NHS trusts in your area. Submit Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to local councils or NHS trusts asking for data on CAMHS waitlists, referral rejections, and crisis response times.
What does this have to do with art?
When help never comes, people turn inward. CAMHS delays don’t just leave children unsupported- they leave families isolated, desperate, and traumatised. For many here, art became a form of survival. A way to process the chaos, the silence, the worry.
At NotFine, we showcase the raw emotional truth behind these failures. Because sometimes, what can’t be said with words alone shines through art.