"Children's Mental Health Treatment Outcomes Day."

totally agree!

Children deserve better from our nation's mental health system. After all, it is better that has always been promised but too rarely delivered. One would have expected that organizations which promote the identification of children with mental illnesses and/or encourage children to be treated feel some sense of responsibility to insure they receive the care they claim and realize the outcomes they profess. Systems which operate sans accountability rarely improve and too often fail those who look to them.

Adolescent Psychiatric Hospitalization and Mortality, Distress Levels, and Educational Attainment: Follow-up After 11 and 20 Years

Excerpt: "Adolescent psychiatric hospitalization affects tens of thousands of families, yet little is known about the longterm outcome of adolescents with psychiatric symptoms sufficient to result in psychiatric hospitalization. This prospective study, with its comparison group, 11 and 20-year follow-ups, and 95% participant retention, indicates that hospitalized youths, in comparison with typical high school students, were significantly more likely to die and to report higher levels of emotional distress and were significantly less likely to graduate from high school and complete college and graduate school across time." (See Table 2)

Joe:

It isn't really surprising that children with major depression, OCD, ODD, CD and so on would have poorer outcomes compared to children not diagnosed with a psychiatric illness, irrespective of whether they were hospitalized or not. Perhaps a better comparison would be between children with psychiatric illnesses who were hospitalized versus those who weren't? That would remove mental illness as a confounder in the study. Regardless, psychiatric treatment does not have the efficacy that everyone would want, especially with children.

I spent last weekend at a yoga retreat center doing a workshop with Julia Cameron, author of "The Artist's Way." We did a lot of small group work over the weekend. Sunday morning I was in the saddest little group imaginable, a real heartbreaker for me.

I was with a young woman in her early 20s, another woman in her early thirties and myself, in my early 60s. As we talked I became aware these young woman had mental health histories so I came out with my own hospitalizations. They heaved sighs of relief, acknowledged their own histories. We talked about what it's like to grow up labeled and deemed "defective" in some way.

The younger woman tentatively said "I've heard some people like us call themselves 'survivors.'" Yep. I told her I consider myself a survivor of the psychiatric/mental "health" system and that I'm doing so much better without them, their constant negative judgments of my inner life and their mind-altering drugs.

It feels to me as if we're taking the concrete out of children's foundations and replacing it with sand. How can you face adulthood when you've spent your formative years being told you're just not good enough, you can't cut it, there's something wrong with you? Where does that leave you?

We swapped some resources, including FS. I hope to see these two fine young women here and hope they get appropriately angry at the way in which they've been shortchanged and denied the birthright of every child--the right to feel good about who you are.

"How can you face adulthood when you've spent your formative years being told you're just not good enough, you can't cut it, there's something wrong with you? Where does that leave you?"

I can tell you where the fuck it's left me. I was diagnosed as "emotionally disturbed" at five in the 1980s, because back then, a little girl who acted like a little boy was obviously "ill" and "disturbed." No one really even knew you could be born as one gender and act/feel another, and the proper therapy even if it had been recognized as that at the time was "bringing you to normal."

The diagnosis + your family treating you like you're some sort of crazy bomb waiting to go off for almost all your childhood. . . it does scar you very deeply.

You become hyperaware of being observed, of being watched, of having to constantly "be good" like life is some sort of stage where the only acceptable performance is to be "good" and "not troubling" or a graded test. You learn to fear authority, and you're scared of everyone and everything.

You look at yourself and know there's never anything good there, that it's irreparably broken and scary. Combine that with gender dysphoria for something really nice.

As a teenager, you fall into fundamentalism and assume that you must be demon-possessed because that sounds somewhat better than "irreparably broken" - at least demons can be expelled, according to fundamentalism, and maybe there is something good inside somewhere after they're all gone.

Your family, terrified of you despite how much you try to impress them and "make progress," forbids you from getting summer jobs, from driving, from almost any of the normal teenager stuff. So you read a lot and become a geek because knowledge is your only power in a world that's decided you should have none.

You realize what a ton of bullshit it all is in college, you "wake up" once you're away from the family you're so scared will reassert control over you by having you institutionalized or something, because they have this diagnosis, they have all the times you've cried or been angry or showed any emotion at all as a sword over your head.

The student loans you took out for college because all the wonderful advisers (including your sister) have told you you're too weak to have a job and go to classes at the same time don't give you money for your last year. So you're left at 25 with little valid work experience, loan debts in the tens of thousands, no job, no car, nothing and you have to scramble for anything you can get.

In my case, I rebelled hard and like that I did, because my renunciation of organized religion and authority and such gives me strength, along with slowly going from "what will people think" to "fuck what people think."

That said, it's left so many deep scars on me that I don't think I'll ever fully get past having had everything from my finances to my self-respect to my soul ripped away before I even knew it was. . . no matter how much I try to go on and be like "it's over now, I'm free even if I'm dirt poor and being pursued by debt collectors."

Hell, if my family had just raised me as a normal boy rather than as a crazy damaged girl, things would have been different. :P But then maybe I wouldn't be who and what I am trying to be now. . .who knows.

What they do to children in psych hospitals is horrible. I remember seeing a child who was about 8 or 9 being held down as they drew his blood. This child was terrified. He was in a foreign environment, taken away from everything he knew, held down for blood draws in front of other children, and then not even comforted. I think of how different it is when a child is in a regular hospital. They give them stickers and stuffed animals. They comfort them. Family members sleep next to their beds.

A few of the children watching this child being held down froze, obviously very afraid. Other children laughed and made fun of him.

In a very short time that place did a tremendous amount of emotional damage to that child and for what? You cause trauma to treat trauma?

When will people get an f'ing clue about the damage they're doing?

SteveB,
Yes, there will always be children who have genuine problems and who benefit from genuine treatment. But we're now engaging in wholesale labeling and "treatment" of dubious value and that's quite a different thing. A society that ignores the established fact (Russele, et al) that 25% of females are sexually abused before the age of 18, that rushes instead to label and drug any of these children without dealing with the underlying problem is simply not doing a good job. In fact, it is merely compounding the abuse.

I am one of *those* kids, all grown up with nowhere to go. Instead of a label and side-effects laden pills (which, happily, were far less available when I was a kid) I would have benefited by someone stopping my mother from incesting me, selling me to her brothers for a sandwich and a bottle of beer and trying to murder me repeatedly. THAT would have actually helped.

But no, we don't do that sort of thing. We'd rather have little cash cows for the middle class to milk.

I am really glad you actually got some help from the system and yes, that's the sort of thing that *should* be happening. But extending the wrong kind of help to people who will never benefit and who are actually harmed really isn't good.

Sherry