At this point I widen the focus to consider ways and means to establish and strengthen a joined-up network of preventive community support services specifically for children and young people caught up in the process of critical family change resulting from serious parental conflict, separation and divorce. In so doing, I adopt the standard classification of preventive services, generally held to have three tiers: primary, secondary, tertiary.

In the light of the Government's Green paper Transforming Children and Young People's Mental Health Provision issued in December 2017 two introductory points need to be made with respect to the approach to early preventive mental health which I advocate in this part of the book. First: while the Green Paper deals with general mental health problems presented by children and young people in schools, I focus specifically on the support needs of youngsters whose wellbeing and mental health can be put at risk by serious parental conflict, separation and divorce – an experience which for many is a complex form of bereavement. Secondly, the Green Paper mentions four specific preventive interventions – cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), mindfulness, family based behavioural change and group based intervention – whereas in this book I aim to examine and revive interest in the application of a particular form of non-stigmatic primary preventive community mental health support. This is based on a conceptual framework developed originally in the United States by the social psychiatry movement (see Chapter Six). Nevertheless I see this as complementary to the interventions mentioned in the Green Paper. For example, all these different forms of preventive supportive intervention should be applied by ‘appropriately trained supported staff such as teachers, school nurses, counsellors and teaching assistants’.

As mentioned in the Preface, and like the Green Paper, I argue for a network of preventive services capable of deploying practitioners trained in face-to-face work with young people and able to sensitively apply short-term supportive crisis intervention techniques (see further below). This will involve ‘first responder’ organisations such as schools and primary healthcare teams, as well as ‘secondary’ support services linked, for example, to the family justice system (considered in Part III) – all settings where the primary task is to help children navigate critical transitions in their home life so as to adapt socially and psychologically to the difficulties between their parents.