Despite the agonies that still echo from the Virginia Tech massacre, mental health care in Virginia remains woefully inadequate — especially for children. What’s more, the system’s fragmented and bureaucratic apparatus almost seems designed to squander inadequate resources: Children are shuffled around from agency to agency while their condition deteriorates to the point of crisis.
When a sick child does reach that stage, the family may be confronted with another roadblock. The state has only one acute psychiatric hospital for children, with just 48 beds. As a result, many children who should receive treatment receive incarceration instead. More than half the young people in Virginia’s juvenile-justice system have psychiatric problems sufficient to have warranted prescription meds at some point. And those figures exclude mental and emotional problems such as drug addiction. Children who do gain admission to the Commonwealth Center for Children and Adolescents often get re-admitted, and the readmission rate has been increasing — a sign that community services are inadequate.
The system cries out for an overhaul — which seems unlikely to occur in the immediate future. But Virginia can take steps to ameliorate the situation. Advocates are hoping to set up a number of crisis-intervention pilot projects around the state. The projects would combine mobile crisis teams with neighborhood stabilization units to interrupt the downward spiral and prevent hospitalization from becoming a cycle.
With a price tag of $16.5 million and a constituency that does not swing much political weight, the proposal faces an uphill climb at the State Capitol. But unlike many other causes, it lacks opposition: Nobody can argue against it on principle, and it certainly is not frivolous. The only obstacles are scarcity and indifference. Given the urgency of the issue, they hardly seem sufficient reasons to say no.
Richmond Times-Dispatch
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