The Tower of Babel is an ancient story, versions of which are described in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faith traditions. The story has it that in Babel men started building a tower to reach up into heaven. God, dismayed at this arrogance, introduced different languages into the population of builders, architects, designers and decorators; as a result, unable to communicate effectively to one another, work ceased.

To caricature this process, in a conventional Multi-Disciplinary Team setting the young person and family are approached at various times by a variety of different characters, all with a job of work in mind.

Inevitably, each practitioner presents his or her formulation of the "problem" either implicitly or explicitly in the language of framework within which he or she was trained.

For instance (and we are here deliberately caricaturing this process), the systemic family therapist may speak of "patterns of relating", the psychiatrist of "genetic vulnerabilities and neurotransmitters", the cognitive-behaviourist of "negative automatic thoughts", and the social worker of "deprivation and lack of opportunity", etc, etc.

Thus traditional modes of delivering multiple modalities via different members of the Multi-Disciplinary Team risk delivering to the patient an experience of many interested adults who nonetheless appear to be in disagreement, and who perhaps do not fully understand each other, let alone how to integrate their approach with that of other professionals (see Dis-integratedInterventions.) So, at the point of their own experience of extreme psychic disintegration, the young person and the family are implicitly expected to integrate what academics and clinicians over the past century have signally failed to integrate.

The position of the patient then becomes analogous to that of a child of warring parents, who may fear to be seen to side with either parent too definitely for fear of upsetting the other and sink into paralysis. In integrative practice, far as possible, it is the KeyWorker who takes responsibility for this integrative function him or herself, rather than leaving it to the patient. In delivering the majority of the treatment modalities through a single relationship, albeit one that is explicitly, actively and powerfully supported by a wider team, integration occurs in the private interstices between client and therapist.

You can see Formulation and Treatment Aims for the AMBIT version of recording this.