Skellern lecture Laureate 2025
2025 - 2025
| Recognition Type | Awards and prizes (external) |
|---|---|
| Description | Eileen Skellern made a major contribution to the development of modern, interpersonally mediated, mental health nursing and following her death in 1980 a lecture series was founded in her name. Since 2006 the Skellern Lecture has been delivered on an annual basis alongside a Lifetime Achievement Award. The Skellern Lecture is awarded by an independent panel of experts in the field for significant contribution to the advancement of the field of mental health nursing. This combined event is now the UK’s leading celebration of excellence and accomplishment in the mental health nursing field. Celeste Will be delivering her lecture titled ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: revealing the nature of children and young people’s mental health nursing’, on the 5th June 2025, hosted by the University of Manchester. lecture synopsis: Dr Celeste Foster, Associate Professor Mental Health nursing, University of Salford It is only with the heart that one can see rightly: revealing the nature of children and young people’s mental health nursing. Children and young people (CYP) are our social capital, the vanguards of cultural revolution and drivers of social justice and progress. This year, the lancet commission on adolescent health highlighted that mental ill-health is the single biggest threat to health, wellbeing and productivity of young people, and the adults they will become. Adolescence is the peak age of onset for severe mental health conditions that persist into adulthood. Globally, youth mental health has deteriorated over the last 15 years. Psychosocial development in the second decade of life sets the neurological, affective and occupational frame in which the rest one’s life and wellbeing is played out, making youth mental health care one of the best long-term buys in health care. Yet, despite vociferous political narratives to the contrary, youth mental health services are and have always been under-funded, neglected and subsumed within an adultist psychiatric paradigm, that is not fit-for our young people’s needs. Mental health nurses make up the largest workforce within CYP mental health services in the UK. They work, innovate and craft their nursing practice in the gaping hole where the evidence-base upon which to build effective, developmentally-informed and growth-promoting mental health service provision for children and young people should be. They struggle under the same weight of adultism and stigma-based neglect as the young people for whom they care. Their role, contribution and the specific relational technicality of CYP mental health nursing is repeatedly made invisible, or hidden from view - absent from research, policy and service specifications, often only noticed when things go wrong. A case will be made for new approaches to research and practice enquiry to address this epistemic violence. I will draw on my own work and others, to show that when psychodynamic and psychosocial methods of inquiry, that accept the role of intimacy and love in both the emergence and reparation of mental distress, are used to shine a light on the work of CYP mental health nursing, it reveals itself as a highly complex relational process. Central to the process is implementation of the aspects of the primary carer-child relationship that are known to bring emotional and mental resilience to life. CYP mental health nurses occupy unresolvable tensions, symbolic of the uncomfortable psychic space young people and their families must navigate between childhood and adulthood. I will set out the specific personal qualities, values, and sensory-affective-cognitive processing skills used by CYP mental health nurses to manage highly disturbing adolescent emotionality and to create the interpersonal conditions required for recovery from mental distress, alongside the acquisition of the language, mentalisation and regulation capacities that all young people need to manage their own thoughts, feelings and behavioural impulses independently. The wider implications for mental health nursing education, support, interventions and trauma-informed paradigms of care across the life-course, will be laid out. |
| Affiliated Organisations | #1 ORGANISATION NOT LISTED |
| Research Centres/Groups | Centre for Applied Health Research |
| Projects | NAPICU CAMHS Project + iPhD |
| Org Units | School of Health & Society |
| URL | www.skellern.info |