Children’s social workers' perspectives on mental health and working with child mental health teams: Systematic review and narrative synthesis

Summary: Children’s social workers regularly work with children and young people (CYP) with mental health difficulties. This review provides an account of the empirical literature regarding social workers’ perspectives on mental health, neurodevelopment and working with mental health teams. This systematic review utilised PRISMA guidance to conduct a narrative synthesis of the relevant literature. A protocol for this review was published on Prospero, CRD42021267407. In total, 21 empirical studies met our inclusion criteria.Findings: Social workers reported that young people with social care involvement can experience considerable challenges accessing timely mental health support. There was some evidence that organisational shortcomings were regarded as having a particularly detrimental impact on children with social care involvement. Social workers had concerns regarding the utility of psychiatric diagnosis, though they appreciated ‘trauma’ vocabularies. Applications: Despite considerable theorising about mental health in the social work literature, very few empirical studies have examined social workers' perspectives on these topics. Both social work research and practice might benefit from further empirical work examining, among other things, trauma discourses and the interaction between escalations in mental health and social care interventions.