Report: Mentally Ill Youths 'Warehoused'

[GreenPartyVoter]

WASHINGTON (AP) - Thousands of mentally ill youths are unnecessarily put in juvenile detention centers to await mental health treatment, a House committee reported Wednesday.

Centers usually are not equipped to treat mental illness, and in some cases the youths have not been charged with a crime, said the report by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee.

"The use of juvenile detention facilities to house youth waiting for community mental health services is widespread and a serious national problem," said the report, which found that two-thirds of juvenile detention facilities hold youths who are waiting for mental health treatment.

"This misuse of detention centers as holding areas for mental health treatment is unfair to youth, undermines their health, disrupts the function of detention centers and is costly to society."

http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20040707/D83M1KS80.html

[papau]

1. Excellent summary - AP should promote editor and Writer!

:-)

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Good reporting is so rare these days, it's almost shocking to stumble

across it.

[Tsiyu]

3. You Should Have Seen

The mental facility I visited in Georgia when Zell Miller was Gov. To think that the state inspects other facilities when their own are just like medieval torture chambers. The only way I got any action was by contacting then Speaker of the House Tom Murphy. He called me at home and within days had a questionnaire circulating in that facility about the abuses. They closed that one down shortly thereafter.
I can only imagine how pathetic things are these days. And how many of these kids get to be the guinea pigs for modern military interrogation techniques....

[Tsiyu]

4. Kick

[dArKeR]

5. Locking anyone up in a cage would cause more psychological problems

yahoo link
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040707/ap_on_go_co/youths_mental_health_2