CAMILLE - Empowerment of Children and Adolescents of Mentally Ill Parents through Training of Professionals working with children and adolescents

Children living with a mentally ill person are at a significantly greater risk to develope short and long term mental health problems or psychosocial difficulties. The lack of and need for better knowledge and training of the child care professionals is underlined by the scientific community, as well as the lack of pan-European guidelines for promoting healthy behaviour in children of mentally ill parents.

The CAMILLE project will develop the following activities:

• explore, examine, and describe existing measures, programmes or initiatives in different organisations across Europe, focusing on promoting healthy behavior in children and adolescents of mentally ill parents;
• develop a new pan-European training course to upgrade the skills of the professionals working with the families of mentally ill parents;
• pilot the developed training course;
• assess end evaluate the piloted training course in order to adjust and thereby strengthen its potential to be a future valuable tool to use across Europe.

Dissemination throughout the project includes writing articles on the project to be published in national and international journals, developing a website, facebook group and Youtube pages for the project. The training and project results will be disseminated in a European conference for a large audience. The primary beneficiaries for the training programme are thousands of European children and adolescents living with a mentally ill parent.

The main output of the project is a training programme for children and partners of a mentally ill against possible risks of violence. The main aims of the course will be the following:

• to improve the intra- and inter-professional and cross-sectional cooperation both within the different countries and between the different countries to gain knowledge and improve practice through increased and improved pan-European cooperation;
• to strengthen and qualify the participants’ competences to enter into the process with the whole family, when the first signs of worry for the well-being of the child and its family are registered, and there is a need to talk about or act on the well-being of the child or adolescent;
• to strengthen the participants’ ability to trace and solve problems before they grow;
• to improve the childcare professionals’ competences to deal with all families with a mentally ill parent present in the population, whatever the ethnic background of the family. The training course will contain an optional module focusing on working with children and families belonging to ethnic minorities in the society that in most countries is a vulnerable and growing part of the population, e.g. refugees families where a parent is suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).