ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) inpatients interpret expressions of adult institutional power within the ward-place where they enact strategies of negotiation and resistance. The responsibility for negotiating this discursive tension between being and becoming was assumed by adult actors within the machinery of state, for whom the guiding of youth into adulthood represented an ethical obligation; a necessity if society were to avoid descent into moral anarchy. Access to responsive, individualised care in these spaces requires negotiation of the biases of adult actors, with young people's views of their treatment only given sufficient validation to affect change when deemed 'age-appropriate' by staff. Conceptualising adolescents as a socially marginalised group contributes to our understanding of young people as mental health service users. Given the traumatogenic social power imbalances that lead so many young people to mental health service involvement.
