Brief Interventions That Make a Difference: Practical Approaches for Young People and Families – An International Expert Conference

16 June 2026 1pm

Event type International Expert Conference

EARLY BIRD!
Webinar, via Zoom at 1:00pm - 5:00pm UK time, 2:00pm - 6:00pm CET
Can't make it, don't worry, book now as delegates have exclusive access to recordings for 90 days after the event, together with slides. You must book before the event starts, there are no tickets after the event starts.

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Tags: Evidence-based, Intervention… Show all

Topics: Evidence-based, Intervention, Management, Mental health, Research, Treatment
Populations: Adolescents, CAMHS services, Children and Young People, Clinicians
Interventions: Psychotherapies

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Following the huge success of our inaugural ‘International Expert Conference’ last year we are delight to bring you the second in the series which will focus on brief interventions for children and young people, designed for clinicians and practitioners working in time-limited and high-pressure contexts.

Across five focused sessions, leading experts will explore practical and scalable approaches to supporting young people and families: from single-session intervention models and intensive one-session CBT for phobias, to compassionate approaches to suicide risk and crisis care in overstretched services, as well as experience-sensitive clinical work with autistic young people.

Each talk will include live Q&A, offering clear insights and practical ideas that can be taken directly into everyday clinical practice.

Booking

Sign up at this link or on the Book Now button at the top of the screen, and complete the form that follows. You’ll then receive an email confirmation and a link to the webinar, plus we’ll send you a calendar reminder nearer the time. Delegates will have exclusive access to recordings for 90 days after the event, together with slides. Plus you will get a personalised CPD/CME certificate via email.

ACAMH Members MUST login to book onto the webinar in order to access this webinar and get a CPD/CME certificate
Non-members this is a great time to join ACAMH, take a look at what we have to offer, and make the saving on these sessions

EARLY BIRD £109 (until 14/04/26, then £139) for ACAMH Members (Print, Online, Concession) Join now and save

EARLY BIRD £139 (until 14/04/26, then £169) ACAMH Learn Account holders

EARLY BIRD £139 (until 14/04/26, then £169) Non Members

£15 ACAMH Undergraduate/Postgraduate Members

LIC Members free

Don’t forget as a charity any surplus made is reinvested back as we work to our vision of ‘Sharing best evidence, improving practice’, and our mission to ‘Improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people aged 0-25’.

About the sessions

Dr. Georgia Pavlopoulou – An Experience-Sensitive Approach to neurodivergence in clinical environments

Clinical environments are typically organised around neurotypical expectations of communication, attention, and sensory tolerance. For neurodivergent individuals-including autistic people, those with ADHD, and individuals with co-occurring autism and ADHD (AuDHD)-these environments can increase distress, reduce engagement, and lead to misinterpretation of behaviour.

Building on the framework proposed by McGreevy et al. (2024), this talk outlines an experience-sensitive approach to clinical practice that centres neurodivergent perspectives and interprets behaviour in relation to environmental, sensory, and cognitive demands. Rather than framing differences primarily through deficit models, the approach emphasises understanding patient responses as meaningful adaptations to clinical and every day life contexts.

While the framework draws on autism-informed practice, its application to ADHD and AuDHD will also be explored, particularly in relation to executive functioning demands, attentional variability, and emotional regulation.

The presentation also addresses producing reports that remain clinically accurate while avoiding dehumanising or overly pathologising descriptions. Attention is given to how rigour and clarity can be maintained alongside language that reflects context, strengths, and lived experience.

By foregrounding neurodivergent experience, clinicians can improve engagement, reduce distress, and create more responsive clinical environments.

Learning outcomes

Understand how neurotypical expectations in clinical environments can affect engagement and distress in neurodivergent individuals, including autistic people and those with ADHD or AuDHD.
Apply an experience-sensitive framework to interpret behaviour and produce clinical reports that remain rigorous while avoiding overly pathologising language.

Professor Pooja Saini – Crisis Close‑Up: Caring for Families on the Edge – While Staff Are at Breaking Point

This session explores what crisis care truly looks and feels like for families, young people, and the professionals supporting them. My research focuses on suicide and self-harm prevention, with particular attention to young people, families, and communities experiencing inequality and struggling to access timely support. Through collaborations with charities, NHS partners, and public health teams, I work to understand how overstretched systems shape real world crisis responses—and how people on all sides navigate them.

Drawing on interviews with frontline workers, caregivers, young people, and service users, this talk shares close up insights into what happens when families reach breaking point while staff themselves are overwhelmed. These conversations reveal a system where compassion is abundant but capacity limited; where professionals work to hold risk, distress, and complexity, even as they face burnout, moral distress, and organisational pressure.

The session will highlight co produced solutions developed through lived experience and frontline expertise, such as:

Co produced materials—practical, accessible resources created with young people and families to support communication, safety, and shared understanding across services.
Peer led support pathways, developed in partnership with community organisations, that reduce pressure on crisis teams while giving families timely, relatable help.
Brief relational practices co designed with staff—simple, evidence informed actions that promote connection and calm during high pressure encounters.
Collaborative postvention approaches co developed with bereaved families and charities to better support communities after a crisis.
Participants can expect a grounded, honest conversation about crisis care: its realities, its constraints, and the hopeful, human practices that still make a difference.

Learning outcomes

To understand the experiences of families, young people, and frontline staff during mental health crises, informed by suicide and self‑harm prevention research.
To recognise how staff pressure and burnout affect crisis responses and decision‑making, drawing on collaborative work with NHS and community partners.
To use co‑produced approaches to enhance crisis support across different settings.

About the speaker

Jessica_Schleider

Dr. Jessica Schleider is a clinical psychologist, intervention scientist, and Associate Professor of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University. She is the Founding Director of the Lab for Scalable Mental Health and an internationally-recognized leader in research on single-session interventions for youth mental health. Her professional mission is to build and disseminate scalable, evidence-based mental health solutions that bridge gaps in mental health care ecosystems worldwide.

In support of her research on single-session mental health interventions, Dr. Schleider has secured >$12.6 million in federal (NIH, NSF, HRSA), foundation, and industry grant funding as PI or Project Lead. Dr. Schleider been recognized via numerous awards, including the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award; the ABCT President’s New Researcher Award; and the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology’s Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Early Career Research Award. Her work has been featured in media outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, and in 2020 she was chosen as one of Forbes‘ 30 Under 30 in Healthcare.

Dr. Schleider has published >160 articles and book chapters. She has created or co-created seven open-access, single-session mental health programs, which have reached >100,000 teens and adults to date. Based on these programs, Dr. Schleider and her colleagues wrote a self-help workbook, The Growth Mindset Workbook for Teens. She also co-edited the Oxford Guide to Brief and Low-Intensity Interventions for Children and Young People and wrote a nonfiction book, LITTLE TREATMENTS, BIG EFFECTS on how single-session interventions can transform mental health.

To support individuals and institutions in scaling evidence-based SSIs, Dr. Schleider regularly consults for national health care organizations, digital health and social media companies, and providers across the globe. Dr. Schleider completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Harvard University in 2018, along with her Doctoral Internship in Clinical and Community Psychology at Yale School of Medicine.

Pooja Saini

I’m Professor Pooja Saini, a UK academic specialising in suicide and self-harm prevention. My work at Liverpool John Moores University focuses on understanding how young people, families, and communities can be better supported during mental health crises, and how we can reduce the health inequalities that place some groups at greater risk. I collaborate widely with mental health charities, public health teams, and the NHS to ensure research leads to real and meaningful change in services. Much of my work is grounded in co‑production, making sure that people with lived experience sit at the centre of shaping solutions and interventions.

Over the years, I’ve been involved in building and supporting community initiatives, crisis support services, and national suicide prevention partnerships. These collaborations have strengthened my belief that compassionate, practical approaches are not only possible but essential, especially in overstretched systems where staff and services are under intense pressure. I’m committed to bridging the gap between research evidence and the everyday realities faced by frontline teams and the individuals who rely on them.

I also host Let’s Talk Hope, a podcast where I share conversations about resilience, compassion, and what it means to create safer, more hopeful communities – one honest conversation at a time.

Georgia Pavlopoulou

Dr. Georgia Pavlopoulou is an Associate Professor in Mental Health, Neurodiversity, and Implementation Science at UCL’s Division of Education, Health and Clinical Psychology Research Dept at Faculty of Brain Sciences. She is the founder of the Group for Research in Relationships And NeuroDiversity (GRRAND). Georgia’s work integrates behavioural, phenomenological, and participatory methodologies within a developmental framework to examine the social determinants of mental health in autistic and ADHD populations. She is deeply committed to creative, participatory health and educational research, co-producing knowledge with community members across the lifespan, with a particular focus on adolescents. She has led national and international co-produced training programmes for mental health practitioners working with neurodivergent young people across educational settings and the NHS. Georgia currently serves as Chair of the NHS-funded England’s National Autism Peer Education Programme. Georgia is the lead editor of a best seller book fully co-produced with autistic people Improving Mental Health Therapies for Autistic Children and Young People.

Professor David A. Jobes, PhD, ABPP, is a Professor of Psychology and Associate Director of Clinical Training at The Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, DC, where he also serves as Director of the Catholic University Suicide Prevention Laboratory. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University.

As an internationally recognized suicidologist, Dr. Jobes is the author of seven books and hundreds of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters focused on clinical suicidology, suicide prevention, professional ethics and risk-management. He is a past President of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS) and has received numerous awards for his scientific and clinical contributions, including the AAS Shneidman Award (1995) for early career contributions, the AAS Dublin Award (2012) for career contributions in suicidology, and the AAS Linehan Award (2016) for groundbreaking suicide treatment research. He is also the recipient of the 2022 Alfred M. Wellner Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Register of Health Service Psychologists and the 2025 Erwin Ringel Service Award from the International Association of Suicide Prevention (IASP) for career contributions to suicidology.

Dr. Jobes has served as a consultant to numerous federal and national organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Medicine, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. He also served as a Highly Qualified Expert to the U.S. Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.

A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Jobes is board certified in clinical psychology (American Board of Professional Psychology). He serves on the Board of Directors of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP)and is a consultant to the AFSP Public Policy Council. He maintains an active private clinical,, consulting, and forensic,practice in Washington, DC, and Maryland.