Yellowbridge Psychological Services

Yellowbridge has been started up by two Clinical Psychologists with extensive experience of working with looked after children and young offenders and the agencies supporting them.

We, Dr Alison Walker and Dr Jude Courtney, have worked for some years for a very specialist and almost unique Children and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) which provided a full range of mental health services for young offenders, both in the community and in prison. Young people who offend are typically rather chaotic, impulsive and ‘lively’ in their presentation. It was recognised that such young people rarely managed to get a good service from typical community CAMHS. This called for a specialist team who did things a little differently and were passionate about such young people.

Approximately 50% of the young people coming into contact with this team were looked after and adopted children. This built on our previous experience of working for many years in a specialist CAMHS for looked after children and for the professionals and carers who were involved with them. This included children who were in foster care, residential care, placed with family and friends or who had been re-unified with birth families.

Yellowbridge was created to allow agencies to have access to a variety of high quality specialist psychological training courses, consultancy to professionals and carers, and direct services to young people. Since we recognise that paying for an ongoing specialist provision would be too costly for many agencies, Yellowbridge provides a service as and when it is needed, at affordable rates.