Conclusion
What Parents Said...
I am seriously considering telling the judge to
remove him. I don’t feel now there is hope because there is
no place to put him. Obviously nowhere they’re going to find.
He doesn’t need juvenile jail, he needs therapeutic intervention.
If there is nothing available what the heck do I do? (New York)
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Once we zeroed in and found some
nice people with some kind of heart. One social worker, she said,
“I’m going to help you because you’ve been through
so much and you’ve been thrown here and here. I don’t
want her to go through the system, get caught up in it. She needed
to get the help she needed.” She helped me. (New York)
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Comments by the parents in these focus groups serve to illustrate a number
of serious problems with child mental health service systems in this country.
As the President’s Commission on Mental Health has stated, “when
the system fails to deliver the right types and combination of care, the
results can be disastrous for our entire nation: school failure, substance
abuse, homelessness, minor crime and incarceration.” The Commission
emphasized that the “mental health maze” is more complex and
more inadequate for children than for adults and that “families do
not know where to turn.”11 These concerns
were echoed by the parents who participated in this focus group study.
Children do not outgrow serious mental disorders that are left untreated
and the long-term results of systemic failings affect us all: disruption
in school, substance abuse, unemployment and dependency, homelessness
and an increase in minor crime.
The results reported by the few families in this study who had received
appropriate and early services confirm that we know what works. So why
do we give such low priority to providing two to three million children
the services that can improve their lives?
For too long, services to children and their families have been given
a low priority by public mental health systems. Likewise, mental health
has been poorly addressed by other child-serving systems. Families may
do their best, but the odds are against them when public systems turn
their backs on the mental health needs of their children.
The parents we interviewed believe—and the Bazelon Center concurs—that
major reform is needed in the state systems for providing services to
children with mental disorders. Our nation’s children deserve better.
It’s like knocking your head against the wall. Nobody wants to
seem to really listen. And it’s like mind boggling that it takes
a long as it does to get the right services for these kids. (New York)
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