I have been in email contact lately with Allison Pinto, who heads the Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment, or A START, which is a coalition of mental health professional seeking to curb abusive programs like the Seed, Straight, WWASPS, et. al. You can read more about A START here:
http://cfs.fmhi.usf.edu/cfsnews/2005news/A_START.htmland Allison's email address is:
[email protected]. Make sure to tell her you are a program survivor. She wants to get at least 100 of our signatures; so far she only has 35 or so.
Next, I'll paste info about the press conference. So . . .
THE LETTER
Honorable Members of Congress
United States House of Representatives and United States Senate
Washington, DC 20515
Dear Members of Congress,
As parents and family members concerned about the emotional well-being of children, we join together to express our serious concern about the large number of youth with serious mental disorders now housed in unlicensed and unmonitored residential treatment facilities referred to as therapeutic boarding schools. We feel so strongly about the threat posed by this new institutionalization of children and the need for appropriate and effective services that we must write at this time.
In the last fifteen years, unlicensed privately run residential programs for youth with mental and emotional problems have proliferated. Hundreds of new programs now market aggressively over the Internet preying upon desperate families who seek help for their children. Many families pay enormous sums?facilities cost up to $100,000 per year?to obtain ?treatment? for their troubled children. The programs are located around the country, and even outside the country, and often times children are transported hundreds, if not thousands, of miles across state lines to these programs.
The reality of what occurs in some of these programs is often quite different from the highly individualized, highly structured programs advertised to parents. These programs are troubling for a number of reasons.
¨ Children are often prohibited from speaking with their own families for up to six months, a practice which has significant negative consequences for child and parent relationships;
¨ Seclusion and restraint procedures are significantly more restrictive than what is generally accepted by mental health licensing and accrediting bodies. These practices have resulted in several documented deaths;
¨ Even though the needs of the children in these facilities are great, unqualified staff are charged with implementing treatment plans and supervising children;
¨ The educational services provided to the children often fail to meet even minimum standards;
¨ No research has demonstrated that these programs have long-term benefits.
Even more alarming is that abuse and neglect are all too common within these
facilities. There have been many highly public media accounts of atrocious examples of sexual and physical abuse, and medical neglect in these facilities. Yet, there is still little to no public oversight, leaving these already emotionally fragile children even more vulnerable. The lack of oversight in these facilities also means that the full scope of the problem is unknown.
Alternatives have been developed to meet the needs of our children?options that work better and cost less, but they are frequently not available. As the Surgeon General?s Report on Mental Health Reported in 1999, ?the most convincing evidence of effectiveness is for home-based services and therapeutic foster care.? A comprehensive system of care would dramatically reduce the number of children in these facilities because children could be served in their own communities, at a significantly reduced cost.
Today, we join with others in calling on the General Accounting Office to conduct a study into the issue of children housed in unlicensed therapeutic boarding schools, and the conditions that they are required to endure, so that the full extent of the problems in these facilities can be understood. We also urge Congress to enact legislation to increase protections for children in therapeutic boarding programs in the United States and abroad, and to improve access to essential community and school-based mental health services.
Specifically, we urge lawmakers to enact the following bipartisan, commonsense proposals that would support the call from President Bush?s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health to ?swiftly eliminate unnecessary and inappropriate institutionalization,? and that would make the use of therapeutic boarding schools both safe and rare:
¨ End Institutionalized Abuse Against Children Act of 2005 (H.R. 1738);
¨ The Keeping Families Together Act (S. 1704, H.R. 3243);
Too little information is known about the extent of the problems and abuses, and yet what is known is the cause of great concern. As parents, we believe that at best these programs do not meet the needs of many of our children, and, at worst, they subject children to abuse. The undersigned individuals look forward to working with Members of Congress to enact these reforms.
ON BEHALF OF:
AND NOW ABOUT THAT PRESS CONFERENCE:
Allison Pinto writes:
We are on track to conduct a press conference on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, October 18. It will be led by A START (Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment;
http://cfs.fmhi.usf.edu/cfsnews/2005news/A_START.html) and formally co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, Child Welfare League of America, American Association of Community Psychiatrists, American Orthopsychiatric Association, and Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health. The panel of individuals who will be speaking will include: a clinical psychologist from the Florida Mental Health Institute; a child/adolescent psychiatrist from Seattle; a former unregulated program staff member who worked at a program in Idaho; a former program participant who attended a small program in Montana; a parent of a former program participant who attended large programs in Montana and Jamaica; an attorney/MH rights advocate from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in D.C. and Congressmen George Miller and Pete Stark.
Some family members and former program participants have contacted me to ask whether they would have an opportunity to speak at the press conference, and I clarified that the structure of this press conference will not provide formal opportunities, except for the one parent and one youth representative on the panel. However, we anticipate that some of the journalists who are present might want to speak with youth and parents who have had direct experience with the programs. (We have sent invitations to journalists at the Washington Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, Boston Globe, Gannett, Reuters, Associated Press, UPI, Time Magazine, NPR, Primetime, Dateline, Frontline and CBS Nightly News.) We are putting together a sheet with the names and contact info of the parents and youth who have let us know that they would be willing to be contacted by the press by phone or email afterward.
We are really hoping that this press conference prompts a request for Congressional testimony, and when that happens, that is when it would be really important for as many youth and family members as possible to travel to D.C. to share their stories. We will certainly let everyone know when we hear of a call for testimony from Congress.
[ This Message was edited by: marcwordsmith on 2005-10-09 15:27 ][ This Message was edited by: marcwordsmith on 2005-10-09 15:35 ][ This Message was edited by: marcwordsmith on 2005-10-09 19:49 ]