In a speech to the US Senate earlier today, Senator Collins said, "Imagine what it would feel like for a child to be wrenched from his or her family just because of a serious mental illness."
She pointed out that an estimated 20 percent of American children under the age of 17 suffer from a mental, emotional, or behavioral illness. Yet, two-thirds of all young people who need mental health treatment are not getting it.
"Behind each of these statistics is a family that is struggling to do the best it can to help a son or daughter with serious mental health needs to be just like every other kid—to develop friendships, to do well in school, and to get along with their siblings and other family members. These children are almost always involved with more than one social service agency, including the mental health, special education, child welfare, and juvenile justice systems. Yet no one agency, at either the State or federal level is clearly responsible or accountable for helping these children and their families," said Senator Collins.
Senator Collins, who chairs the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has been working for nearly two years to provide States with more resources to help children with serious mental illnesses. It originally came to her attention through a series of stories in the Portland Press Herald, which detailed the obstacles Maine families have faced in getting desperately needed mental health services for their children. Too many families in Maine and elsewhere have been forced to make wrenching decisions when they have been advised that the only way to get the care for their children that they so desperately needed is to relinquish custody and place them either in the child welfare or juvenile justice system.
In 2003, she held hearings at her committee and examined a GAO report, which found that in 2001, parents placed more than 12,700 children into the child welfare or juvenile justice systems so that these children could receive mental health services.
The Keeping Families Together Act would do the following: • Provide grants to states to create infrastructure to support and sustain statewide systems of care to serve these children more effectively and efficiently while keeping them with their families; • Establish a federal interagency task force to examine and make recommendations regarding mental health issues in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems; and • Remove statutory barriers that currently prevent more states from using the Medicaid home- and community-services waiver to serve children with serious mental health conditions.
Senate cosponsors of the bill include Senators Pryor (D-AR), DeWine (R-OH), Bingaman (D-NM), Smith (D-OR), Lieberman (D-CT) and Coleman (R-MN). A similar bipartisan bill is also expected to soon be introduced in the US House of Representatives.
####