Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Nina Tejs Jørring

Nina Tejs Jørring

Nina is employed a senior consultant in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Capital Region of Denmark where she teaches and supervises her colleagues in family collaboration, narrative therapy, and family therapy.

Expert in narrative therapy

Nina Tejs Jørring simultaneously trained to become a child and adolescent psychiatrist and a narrative family therapist. Her vision is that child and adolescent psychiatry becomes a family psychiatry offering co-created treatments.

Founder of the Family Therapeutic Team

Nina and her colleagues founded the Family Therapy Team in the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services of the Capital Region in Denmark. They developed and implemented their manual/guide for collaborative family therapy. This book grew out of their work. The purpose was to develop a treatment based on narrative family therapy to help families struggling with complex psychiatric problems so severe that regular treatment, both in the hospital and in the community, had been inadequate. This book is based on the knowledge created during the unit’s first decade.

ninatejsjorring_portrait

upcoming events and lectures

May 4-6 2022

Bergen, Norway

curriculum vitae, Nina Tejs Jørring

curriculum vitae, Nina Tejs Jørring

Nina Tejs Jørring, MD, simultaneously trained to become a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Copenhagen, Denmark and a narrative family therapist at Dulwich Centre, Australia. She is a senior consultant and certified specialist and supervisor in narrative family psychotherapy at the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in the Capital Region of Denmark.

As a writer of blogs and articles she aims to reduce stigma and encourage medical services to build teams and organizations with leadership that honours the ethical principles of respect, curiosity, trust, and hope. Nina is active on several committee boards and serves as vice chairman of the Danish Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. She was awarded the child and adolescent trainees’ award for advancing teaching environment in Denmark in 2018 describing Nina’s unique teaching and supervisory approach as “innovative, enthusiastic, and inspiring teaching with exemplary tales and engaging metaphors”.

upcoming events and lectures

Maj 4-6, 2022

Bergen, Norway

Ninas vision

Ninas vision

Nina’s vision is that child and adolescent psychiatry becomes a family psychiatry offering co-created treatments. This vision is based on the understanding that when a child suffers from psychiatric problems, the whole family suffers, therefore the family deserves to receive help together.

My ethical standpoint can be described with these sentences:

When one person is struggling with a psychiatric illness, their family struggles, too. Therefore, the whole family deserves help together.

We need to find new treatments that are based both on the bio-psycho-social model and on collaboration with parents and children. Collaboration requires that we meet our patients and their families with respect, curiosity, trust, and hope in order to incorporate their wisdom into the treatment. Treatment should not be something we do onto them, but with them. I use an externalizing language, according to the narrative mantra:

The child is not the problem.

The problem is the problem.

And:

The family is not the problem.

The family has the key to solving the problem.

I do not believe in individual therapy for children. Imagine a child saying, “Hey Mum, I have learned these new things about myself, and I will act differently from now on. Therefore, I expect you to change your behaviour accordingly”. That situation would be impossible for a child. I believe parents are in a better position to change the way family members interact with each other and their problems.