Speech, language and communication needs and mental health: the experiences of speech and language therapists and mental health professionals.
Annabel Hancock, Sarah Northcott, Hannah Hobson and 1 others
PMID 36117337WHAT IT FOUND
Clinicians report that children with speech, language and communication needs are often missed in mental health services because their difficulties are not immediately visible.
They describe traditional talking therapies as too language-heavy for these patients and call for adapted, visual and play-based approaches.
Key findings
01Mental health professionals often fail to identify less visible language disorders like developmental language disorder during assessment, leading to unmodified and potentially inaccessible talking therapies.
02Children with speech, language and communication needs are frequently mislabelled as 'naughty' or having behavioural issues, when their presentation stems from underlying, undiagnosed language difficulties.
03Clinicians perceive blended interventions that combine speech therapy techniques with psychological support, such as using visual aids, play therapy, and explicit emotion vocabulary teaching, as more clinically useful than standard approaches.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study used a convenience sample of 14 clinicians, recruited partly from the researcher's professional network, which may introduce selection bias. The findings reflect clinician perceptions and experiences, not objective measures of patient outcomes or treatment efficacy. The small sample size means the themes may not capture the full range of experiences across different service settings or regions.
Declared interests
The lead researcher's work was part of a pre-doctoral clinical fellowship funded by The National Institute of Health Research.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the clinicians' preference for blended interventions as evidence that these methods are effective. The study reports on what therapists think works and what they experience as barriers, but it did not test any intervention or measure patient outcomes.