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Interview - Monika Jephcott and Sophia O'Neill of Play Therapy UK

People Child Development Wellbeing Health
Monika Jephcott (left), chief executive of Play Therapy UK (PTUK), has spent six years lobbying the Government to ensure children are at the forefront of the reform of the 1983 Mental Health Act, scheduled to become law during this Parliament. Sophia O'Neill, child and family therapist (right), who works as a lead play therapist at Treetops Therapy and teaches a postgraduate Master's course on Practice Based Play Therapy, is PTUK's spokesperson.

WHAT IS PTUK CALLING FOR?

MJ We are members of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on a Fit and Healthy Childhood, and in March 2019, we published the Child Mental Health Charter with the aim of convincing the Government to introduce a Mental Health Bill to support the one in ten children and young people thought to be affected by mental health problems. This got delayed, because of Covid, and now the situation is even more dire.

The statistics from the APPG's latest report, The Covid generation: A mental health pandemic in the making, reveal that one in seven primary-school-aged children had a diagnosable mental illness in 2020. What's worse is that as the Act goes through the parliamentary processes to become a Bill – it is currently a White Paper – there is less and less mention of children and young people.

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