Interview: A vision for mental health - Sarah Brennan, chief executive, YoungMinds

"Mental health remains one of those areas where there is a stigma," says Sarah Brennan, the new chief executive of mental health charity YoungMinds. "This is an issue both in terms of parents and young people admitting there might be something wrong and seeking help and being able to find it."

The government's CAMHS review offers a chance to tackle both this stigma and the gaps in services for children and young people with mental health problems. However, much needs to be done, says Brennan, if it is to deliver the necessary improvements.

"One of the crucial things in the CAMHS review is around access to support and services, around workforce development and training," she says. Brennan believes targets are also crucial and professionals need to understand child development and emotional wellbeing to be able to deliver good CAMHS.

Targets could be integrated into a local authority's local area agreement, says Brennan. But defining such targets isn't straightforward. "It's what these targets are that has to be given a lot of thought," she says. "It's not straightforward because it's such a difficult thing to measure."

Brennan believes teachers could play a role in the future of CAMHS but only if they get appropriate training. "If there is a pupil referral unit or a special school in an area, then these teachers need support and skills," she says. "They need information and a place where they know they can go and get it, and they need to know they are in an area with workforce development."

She adds that getting under-16s out of adult mental health wards is vitally important. "There's a lot of work to be done in helping CAMHS deliver on what is required on age-appropriate services," says Brennan. "It's really patchy across the country. What we want to do is learn about good practice and where it's not happening. We want to ensure that it does happen, through working with commissioners. They have a responsibility to ensure the services they commission match what is required. Young people have already been very important in drawing attention to their experiences of services that didn't match up and need to improve."

Although only appointed in May, Brennan is already thinking about how to change YoungMinds to improve the help it offers young people with mental illnesses.

As part of this improvement, the charity is drawing up a three-year strategic plan and wants to develop its work both in England and the rest of the UK. The charity already works in Wales and Northern Ireland, but Brennan wants to ensure YoungMinds reaches more young people suffering from mental health problems in these countries by introducing services based on successful work in other locations.

Brennan, who replaced Barbara Herts, also wants to get YoungMinds working in partnership with more organisations that have similar aims and shared goals on mental health.

Work to make sure fathers and ethnic minority families get the help they want is also a high priority for Brennan. "There's a real need for parents to be able to access support. We want to ensure our helpline is really well used and alongside all of this we want to develop our website," she says.

"We know the people that call us up are mums, siblings and professionals. We want to enable dads to phone, email or use the website, and black and ethnic minority parents as well. So there's work to be done there about making it comfortable for different groups of parents to access support from us."

BACKGROUND - SARAH BRENNAN'S CAREER HISTORY

- Sarah Brennan became chief executive of YoungMinds on 12 May 2008. She had acted as its interim chief executive since October 2007 after working freelance for 18 months

- Between 2001 and 2006 Brennan was chief executive of Motiv8, a charity that works with young people at risk of offending

- From 1994 to 2001 she worked as director of services for Centrepoint, working with socially excluded and homeless young people

- www.youngminds.org.uk.