News Mashup for August 2020
Nationwide Update on Trading Custody for Care
In August, the University of Maryland School of Social Work, Institute for Innovation & Implementation released a report entitled Relinquishing Custody for Mental Health Services: Progress and Challenges by Beth Stroul. This is the first nationwide analysis since publication of pivotal studies by the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in 2000 and the U.S. Governmental Accounting Office in 2003.
As defined in the report, “Custody relinquishment for mental health services refers to situations in which parents transfer legal and physical custody of their child to the state in order to access services that the child could not obtain otherwise. In these cases, no maltreatment (abuse or neglect) is alleged; rather, parents agree to give up custody of their children in order to receive mental health services, often residential interventions.”
Data obtained from informational scans and interviews with child welfare, children’s mental health agencies, and family-run organizations indicate that the tragic practice of trading custody for care is on the decline, with 74% of states reporting “substantial” or “extensive” progress since release of the 2000 Bazelon report, and 64% of states reporting that the practice occurs only “rarely” now. Tempering this seemingly positive result is the caveat that most agency responses rely on frequency estimates. The authors found that only about 33% of states systematically track instances of custody relinquishment for the specific purpose of accessing mental health services. Click on the link below to read the full report.
Stroul, B. A. (2020). Relinquishing Custody for Behavioral Health Services: Progress and Challenges. Baltimore, Maryland: The Institute for Innovation and Implementation, University of Maryland School of Social Work. Retrieved 10/13/20 from https://theinstitute.umaryland.edu/media/ssw/institute/national-center-documents/Relinquishing-Custody-Full-Report-FINAL-August-2020-9-2-2020.pdf
Unmet Mental Health Care among LGBTQ Youth
Also in August, the Trevor Project released a nationwide study entitled Breaking Barriers to Quality Mental Health Care for LGBTQ Youth by Amy Green, Myeshia Price-Feeney, and Samuel Dorison. The study examines the prevalence and causes of unmet mental health needs in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning youth (LGBTQ). Analytic sampling of 40,001 LGBTQ youth ages 13-24 via on-line surveying revealed that of the 84% respondents expressing desire for mental health counseling in 2019-2020, only 46% actually received it. Cost of services, requirement of obtaining parental permission, and societal stigma were perceived by respondents as the major barriers to obtaining high-quality and culturally appropriate mental health care. Race/ethnicity, gender, geography, and socioeconomic status were all shown to be statistically significant predictors of who obtained care and who did not, with Latinx and Asian American/Pacific Islanders 40% more likely, and Black youth 30% more likely, to have gone without desired mental health care than non-Hispanic White LGBTQ youth. Unmet mental health care was found to be highest in the southern states, and for youth and financially struggling families. Click on the link below to read the full report.
Green, A.E., Price-Feeney, M. & Dorison, S. (2020). Breaking Barriers to Quality Mental Health Care for LGBTQ Youth. New York, New York: The Trevor Project. Retrieved 10/13/20 from https://www.thetrevorproject.org/2020/08/18/.
COVID-19 School Closure and Children’s Mental Health
Just as students were heading into the 2020-21 academic year, Jessica Hoffman and Edward Miller published a cogent editorial entitled Addressing the Consequences of School Closure Due to COVID-19 on Children’s Physical and Mental Well‐Being in the Policy Studies Organization journal of World Medical and Health Policy. The authors discuss the impacts of prolonged school closures from the perspective of nonacademic barriers to learning, which they contend threaten to become ever more acute as the year progresses. Reductions in nonacademic services due to school closures are already taking toll on the most vulnerable students, singling out children who rely on school‐based health and mental health care, children from food insecure households, and children who are at risk of abuse, neglect, and/or homelessness. While schools have become an important delivery system for nonacademic services and supports, most do so with limited resources. The time is now, the authors urge, for federal, state, and local governments to provide policy, tools, and resources to shore up school-based nonacademic services—not only to meet the immediate challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but also to reduce nonacademic barriers to learning for years to come. Click on the link below to read the full report.
Hoffman, J.A. and Miller, E.A. (2020), Addressing the Consequences of School Closure Due to COVID‐19 on Children's Physical and Mental Well‐Being. World Medical & Health Policy, 12: 300-310. Retrieved on 10/13/20 from https://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.365
