The Mental Health Assessment Project

Investigating health communication in real world practice 

PI Dr Michelle O’Reilly (Professor of Communication in Mental Health, Chartered Psychologist in Health (C. Psychol. AFBPSS), Assistant Deputy Chair (UEIC); Co-Chair (RIWG), Assistant Deputy Director Midlands DTP in Mental health and Neuroscience, University of Leicester).

The is work was largely unfunded and exploratory, but our pilot work and PPI activity that preceded it was funded and enabled our project to be conducted: 

Decision making in child mental health assessments: A pilot study. Heart of England Hub: Mental Health Research Network. £13,000.02 (FEC- £24,228.72). Khalid Karim and Michelle O’Reilly.

We recruited participants from a Child and Adolescent mental health service in England. This included 29 practitioners from the outpatient team, and included consultant, staff-grade and trainee child and adolescent psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, assistant psychologists, community psychiatric nurses (CPNs), occupational therapists and psychotherapists. This also included 28 families, and of the children 64% were boys and 36% were girls, with a mean age of 11 years (6-17 years). All initial mental health assessments were video recorded as they occurred naturally in practice. 

Outputs from the project 

• O’Reilly, M., and Kiyimba, N. (2024). Investigating question-answer sequences in child mental health assessments: Engaging children and families through declarative question design. Patient Education and counseling, 121, - 108105
• O’Reilly, M., Kiyimba, N., Lee, V., and Hutchby, I. (2023). Give my child a label: Strategies of epistemic corroboration in case-building within child mental health assessments. Sociology, 57(6), 1410-1429
• Lester, J., O’Reilly, M., Smoliak, O., Muntigl, P., and Tseliou, E. (2023). Soliciting children’s views with circular questioning in child mental health assessments. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 28(2), 554–566
• O’Reilly, M., and Kiyimba, K. (2021). Responsibility inoculation: Constructing ‘good parent’ accounts when accessing child mental health services. Human Systems: Therapy, Culture & Attachment, 1(1), 52-69
• Hutchby, I., O’Reilly, M., Drewett, A., and Lee, V. (2020). 'I was just thinking': Cognitive self-reports and engagement with feelings-talk in child mental health assessments. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 4(2), 146-167
• O’Reilly M. Muskett, T., Karim, K., and Lester, J. (2020). Parents’ constructions of normality and pathology in child mental health assessments. Sociology of Health and Illness, 42(3), 544-564
• Kiyimba, N., and O’Reilly, M., (2020). The clinical use of Subjective Units of Distress scales (SUDs) in child mental health assessments: A thematic evaluation. Journal of Mental Health, 29(4):418-423
• O’Reilly, M., Kiyimba, N., and Lester, J. (2019). Building a case for accessing service provision in child and adolescent mental health assessments. Discourse Studies, 21(4) 421 –437
• Kiyimba, N., O’Reilly, M. and Lester, J. (2018) Agenda setting with children using the three wishes technique. Journal of Child Health Care, 22(3) 419–432
• Kiyimba, N., and O’Reilly, M. (2018). Reflecting on what ‘you said’ as a way of reintroducing difficult topics in child mental health assessments. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 23(3), 148-154
• Kiyimba, N., Karim, K., and O’Reilly, M. (2017). The use of why questions in child mental health assessments. Research on Children and Social Interaction, 1(2), 222-242
• O’Reilly, M. Lester, J., Muskett, T., and Karim, K. (2017). How parents build a case for Autism Spectrum Disorder during initial assessments: “We’re fighting a losing battle”. Discourse Studies, 19(1), 69-83.
• O’Reilly, M., Kiyimba, N. & Karim, K. (2016). “This is a question we have to ask everyone”: Asking young people about self-harm and suicide. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing, 23, 479-488.
• O’Reilly, M., Lester, J. and Muskett, T (2016). Children’s claims to knowledge regarding their mental health experiences and practitioners’ negotiation of the problem. Patient Education and Counseling [Special issue], 99, 905-910
• Stafford, V., Hutchby, I., Karim, K., and O’Reilly, M. (2016). “Why are you here?” Seeking children’s accounts of their presentation to CAMHS. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 21(1), 3-18
• O’Reilly, M., Karim, K., and Kiyimba, N. (2015). Question use in child mental health assessments and the challenges of listening to families. British Journal of Psychiatry Open, 1 (2), 116-120 
• O’Reilly, M., Karim, K., Stafford, V., and Hutchby, I. (2015). Identifying the interactional processes in the first assessments in child mental health. Child and Adolescent Mental Health, 20(4), 195-201
• Antaki, C., and O’Reilly, M. (2014). Either/or questions in psychiatric assessments: the effect of the seriousness and order of the alternatives, Discourse Studies, 16 (3) 327-345