Former Group Home Resident Explains Group Homes

I asked readers the other day to submit contributions of whatever kind so that I could post them today while I busied myself with some outside writing. This one is by Jane Alexander, who authors the fabulous Bipolar Recovery website and is becoming well-known for her YouTube videos, lashes out at group homes she was put in as a teenager. Group homes are a topic of interest because Steven Kazmierczak and Robert Hawkins, the Omaha mall shooter, both spent time in similar facilities. BTW, like me, Alexander is a longtime bipolar who's made the transition to life without meds.

About psychiatric juvenile group homes--these are not country clubs or summer camp. If you can imagine an orphanage combined with high school level dorm setting, combined with a flavor of psychiatric hospital and a dash of juvi detention you get a juvi psych group home.

I spent four years in them [here are links to the two homes she was in]. The State run jobs are the worst, barely a notch above juvi hall/psych prison. The private ones can actually afford to hire a few humans amidst the keepers. The food is better, the cook cares just a fraction more and you can taste the difference. Nevertheless group homes are a nightmare.

They exist in an artificial structure that kids are made to conform to or else. Threats and coercion are the norm. It was horrible living in them. You do not get ‘care’ you get ‘treatment’. Which nearly always means drugs, structured living programs and therapy. That’s it. Everything is in terms of compliance or noncompliance. Acting out always ends up in restraint. I went into those places with extreme PTSD at 14 and I stayed at red alert in these places until I was 18. You can not relax. You are not safe.

There is no trusting the staff and opening up to anyone. You have no privacy, few rights and no say over anything. When you confine a population like that of 40 girls and boys, every single day is insanity hour all day long. It turns out when you force teens with severe mental and emotional problems to cohabitate in a structure of unreality unlike anything they grew up, they get stressed!

In these places it is not unusual for kids to attack each other and the staff. The staff attack back. They call it restraint but it is assault and battery. If you grew up with child abuse only to have staff pin you down to the hard floor, all your triggers go off. They add injury to the injustice. Your roommates are cutters, ODD/ADD, teen addicts, criminals. Some would never hurt anyone but themselves. Others physically assault you because of a perceived bad "look" in the blink of an eye. There is no escape from the other kids or the staff.

When you get sick of it and run away, you get recaptured and punished for it. You are put in isolation for days. One kid brings a miniscule amount of contraband, like a single cigarette, and the entire facility is locked down while the staff ransack everyone’s stuff. Even in the middle of the night you are woken up because someone is getting restrained again or it’s time for another random room search.

You see kids twitching, going into seizures in their chairs or slurred speech in groups because of their psych meds. Sexual assault, especially male on male, is rampant. Then there is staff favoritism which can make or break your entire stay there. Or at least a particular shift. It is simply and truly awful.

You don’t get training on how to be an adult. You are not taught anything. The on-site schools are sub par and lean to those with learning problems and low IQ rather than those with higher IQ. It is like an abusive dysfunctional drama family times 100 and, worse, they are all strangers.

To this day, I can vividly remember the things I saw being done to people and the things done to me while I was there. It took me years to get over the nightmares playing in my head from 4 years of psych group homes. Not to mention the rage, the anxiety and triggers. I was a mess when I got out of them at age 18.

Robert Hawkins (Omaha mall shooter last fall) was in group homes too. They said "everything had been done to treat this kid while he was services." These group home admins are full of shit. You do not get help at these places. All you can do is survive them with your personality intact. Many do not.

As chance would have it. I met two former group home "alumni" years later. One girl, as soon as she turned 18, got pregnant and on welfare. She had many problems when she was a resident. One boy was a homeless bum. He was addicted to heroin and sold meth and pot to pay for his habit. He was wanted in half a dozen states and had abscesses from shooting up with low quality drugs all over his body.

I can assure you people, that both this Steven kid and Robert were not being "cared for" in these facilities. Such nonsense.