Davidson, Gavin

Background: People affected by mental illness often come from families with patterns of mental illness that span across generations. Hence, child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) likely provide treatment to many children with parents who also experience mental illness.

Service user and carer involvement in social work education is now well established since its inception as a compulsory requirement in the social work curriculum in the United Kingdom in 2003. Since then, there have been many examples of how such involvement has been approached by education providers. Nevertheless, one of the key obstacles and challenges in this field continues to centre on the need to achieve non-tokenistic user involvement which cements the engagement of service users and carers at the heart of social work education.