Celebrating 20 years of enduring passions and changing contexts: A question of Continuing Professional Development?

In 2005, Bernadette Wren invited members of the editorial board to look back over the Journal’s first decade and to predict future themes. It has been a pleasure to reread everyone’s contribution, and a privilege, now as joint editor, to reflect on the second decade which we celebrate this year. My initial observations are revealed in my title. In 10 years, much has changed and much has remained the same, in the world, and in our work. Not surprisingly, these changes and continuities are evident in the pages of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry (CCPP). Bernadette remarked on how differently each board member responded to her invitation in 2005. Nevertheless, consistent issues emerged both as past themes and future challenges. These included the often unrecognised impact of trauma and maltreatment on children and families, the idea that crude diagnostic systems miss the point, the importance of integrating new ideas with insights from earlier work, the unmet needs of children in care, the personal demands of clinical practice and the difficulties of addressing the wider politics of child and family health care policy. These threads have stayed alive over the past 10 years in different ways throughout the journal, in articles, editorials, special sections, test of time features and soap box pieces. It seems fitting to be reminded of the headings used by Bryan Lask our founding editor in his section of the 2005 commentary. He expressed some surprise at the breadth of topics and wanted to declare the first decade as the decade of the As, citing Abuse, Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Adoption, AIDS, Anorexia nervosa, Attachment, Autism and Adolescence as dominant themes. He hoped that the coming decade might see more of the Ts, arguing that the following topics deserved more attention: Taxonomy, Technology, Terrorism, Therapy, Trauma, Tyranny and Theory of Brain. I am not sure if Bryan would think that all his Ts have made their mark. One of them, Technology, clearly has, and in ways few of us could have predicted. It is self-evident that changes in communication technology have impacted on all of our lives in the last 10 years. A quick search of the CCPP archive revealed 10 articles which directly discuss clinical uses of these technologies, two published in 2000 and a further eight in the last 10 years. Practitioners report using new ways to provide various kinds of additional information to families and young people, to offer interactive support and to develop therapeutic games. In my practice, it is a rare child who doesn’t attend with their favourite device in hand, usually switched on. Dealing with ‘in the room’ niceties about mobile phones and iPads, and taking advantage of the opportunities they can provide has become routine. I have needed to pay careful attention to keep up with the changing worlds of children and young people. They inhabit a potentially all-involving virtual universe that can present new opportunities and unexpected concerns which their parents and their clinicians can find challenging to manage. 557174 CCP0010.1177/1359104514557174Clinical Child Psychology and PsychiatryBrazier research-article2015