"I'm coming here to get help for my daughter, I'm not coming here to sit in a hotel waiting area" ... representations of the build and space for users of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service

There is a growing policy and research agenda which seeks to elicit young peoples’ views on mental health provision of appropriate services (Worrall-Davies, 2008) often focusing on planning and service delivery (Worrall-Davies & Marino-Francis, 2008). Less seems known about how young people, and those who care for them, respond to the build and space environment in which mental health treatment takes place, namely the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service. There is some research evidence to suggest that the psychological and social needs of patients may be influenced by the design of the Healthcare facilities in which they are situated (Ulrich, 1991; 1992; Ulrich, Lawson & Martinez, 2003). Drawing together the perspectives of sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978) and explorations in social geographies we will draw on data from staff, parents and the children themselves to examine their accounts of the building and space in two CAMHS clinics in Central England. Interview data were used to examine how users of these two particular CAMHS clinics viewed the location, facilities and build environment and children’s drawings used to explore their “imagined” and aspired CAMHS geographies. We take the position that the experience of space underpins the social relations and identities which are constantly reconstructed and renegotiated (Valentine, 2001). Thus, the social geographies of mental health locate mental health in a physical sphere and connect mental health with place. We asked in what ways the physical or external places and spaces of CAMHS interact and intersect with the internal places and spaces of identity and identification which are being negotiated by the users of the service (Parr and Philo, 1995). Our findings to date suggest that powerful associations with other locations such as home or hospital link with how CAMHS space is identified.