Integrated practice starts from a position which places a high value on the relationships between different parts of a system and attempts to either emphasise coherence between different parts of a system or to make explicit conflicts or contradictions which may exist in a system.

Integration does not make an assumption that all conflicts and contradictions within a system can be resolved and that an individual practitioner or a clinical team may need to tolerate high levels of contradiction in wider systems as part of efforts towards greater integration.

Integrated practice can often be presented as if this is assumed to be the 'normal position', and that it can readily be achieved in designing a service system. However, practitioner experience suggests that specific 'helping' systems around troubled families and young people routinely include complex conflicts and contradictions which nobody has intentionally set up. In our view, practitioners often experience systems around a young person as routinely appearing to be 'disintegrated' (see Dis-integration and Dis-integratedInterventions).

The aim of this section is to provide a framework which is accepting of this situation and tries to offer a way of making sense of dis-integrative processes around a family or young person.

In this framework, disintegrative processes are seen within the context of different Domains, and at different Levels. Common dis-integrative processes are:

1. Conflict (implicit, unrecognised)
2. Rivalry
1. This may be more acute in times when contracts for work are placed out to tender, so that other agencies working with the same young person may be "in the running" for the tender for "your" agency's work.
3. False beliefs:
1. These are the kinds of "mythologies" about other agencies in a network that easily arise as a result of the kind of biased feedback that every worker/agency is subjected to.
2. Young people don't arrive at "my" service unless other services have "failed"
3. Young people often unconsciously provoke active engagement by their workers by criticising other workers who have failed to help them in the past
4. Policy contradictions
5. Financial constraints

We promote a pro-active stance towards Addressing Dis-integration - chiefly using the Dis-integration grid as a tool to support this.