I know some of these kids. Most do not know who their fathers are – but that is hardly their fault or their problem, is it?
When I meet with them, whether as a guardian ad litem or as their court appointed attorney, they are grateful for a listening ear. Most have no family to fall back on, and many are survivors of abuse and neglect.
Some have been diagnosed as bipolar, or as having other serious mental health disorders. One thing they all have in common – at the age of 14, 15, 16…they are behind bars when what they needed was mental health treatment and a secure place to live.
We can pay now – or as a society, we will surely pay later.
Some cultures use “the long house” for adolescents, not because their family of origin has failed, but as a rite of passage into adulthood.
See: http://books.google.com/books?…
Perhaps looking at a “longhouse” model for adolescents from failed families, rather than the so-called group home would be a better model. Certainly, it is time to think outside the box.
Some of these adolescents may be appropriate for the “empty nester corps” http://bluemassgroup.com/s… while others need the alternate model of the longhouse.
has closed state mental health facilities for both the young and adults…and have forced the Pine Street Inn, Rosie’s Place and jail to become defacto institutions. It’s a disgrace, AmberPaw. Are you paying attention, Brandeis, (the leading fosterer of this movement) – there’s collateral damage to the crap that you preach.
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p>I would support a “long house” and I would support the empty nester corp. Anything has to be better than rolling the dice on these kids, which is what we’re doing now. There’s a completely unnecessary bodycount and we must proactively plan instead of reactively “manage” these kids into early graves or jail.
the ideology underlying the Patrick administration’s decision to close the Fernald Developmental Center for persons with mental retardation. Disclosure: as many of you know, I work for The Fernald League, which is trying to preserve this facility.
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p>As is the case with deinstitutionalized teens and others with mental illness, no viable system exists to adequately care for some of the most profoundly mentally retarded persons in the state who are threatened with eviction from Fernald and potentially other state facilities. In case after case, the deinstitutionalization model has led to declining levels of care and services. This is all about an abdication of our societal and governmental responsibility to care for our most vulnerable citizens.
I agree with what both of you are saying about the De-Institutionalization Movement; it’s been a total disaster, because it really wasn’t well though-out, and, while it’s agreed that sticking mentally ill people, whoever they may be, into human warehouses out of sight and out of mind for the rest of the world, just simply turning hundreds or thousands of mentally ill people out into the streets without any kind of follow-up care isn’t/wasn’t the way to go, either. It’s also led to more homelessness, too, because many mentally ill people have been rejected by family members and/or relatives who can’t or won’t be bothered with having them around, and have ended up on the streets or in homeless shelters, which many people understandably don’t want to enter.
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p>If, however, anything positive has come about from the de-institutionalization movement, it culminated in the closing of a number of really archaic and brutal
state mental hospitals and ushered in more community-based care for most mentally ill or retarded citizens.