3 Bills Proposed to Help Severely Troubled Children

These are no one’s angels: The girl who pounds and pounds her head against the wall or the one who shoves staples, pencils and spoons up her nose and under her skin; the boy who lights fires, threatens to kill and still wets his bed.

Their crimes have made them wards of Los Angeles’ Central Juvenile Hall and poster children--if it’s possible to remember they are children--for the breakdown in California’s mental health system.

Just as jails have become the dumping ground for mentally ill adults, juvenile halls are the holding pen of last resort for disturbed children.

According to government and independent research, more than half of juveniles in custody suffer mental health problems. Nearly a third have attempted suicide. One in 13 take potent psychotropic medication.

What the juveniles rarely get, the studies show, is the treatment they need. Three pending legislative bills seek a way out of this dead end.

The first, SB 2062 by Sen. Don Perata (D-Alameda), is scheduled for debate today before the Senate Public Safety Committee. It would offer $50 million in grants to counties that develop the most viable plans for treatment before, during and after incarceration and are able to pay their share.

The other two bills, set for hearings later this month, would require psychiatric evaluation of all juvenile offenders and create two locked facilities to house the most troubled of them.

At the core of the problem lies the fact that few mental health programs for children will accept those with any history of violence.

No one is denying that the children need more than counseling. The focus of all three pieces of legislation is “restorative justice,” the concept of combining punishment for the crime with treatment for the mental illness. It is an approach that mental health professionals across the state support.

“It has nothing to do with coddling,” said John Robinson, Orange County’s chief probation officer. “It’s a recognition that, left untreated, these kids are going to have the potential for being a real big problem. Some of them may never get well, but at this point we don’t even have the resources or the facilities to try and get them better.”

Perata’s concerns about the system date back to his days as a teacher in Alameda County, he said, when two troubled students committed murders.

“There is no question in my mind that we could be doing a lot more for these very troubled kids and a lot more for society if we spent a few dollars to give them the treatment they needed,” he said.

Although experts say it’s clear that mental illness contributes to youth crime, there is little research to document the connection. Privacy concerns and an inadequate database leave even the California Youth Authority, destination for the most violent offenders, unable to say how many wards’ problems are due to mental illness.

In Los Angeles County, there is no mental health professional on the screening team that evaluates youngsters before their first Juvenile Court hearing, said Dr. William Arroyo, the county’s medical director.

Inaccurate diagnoses may continue throughout their time in custody, Arroyo said, because there are only 20 mental health counselors for the 1,800 youths in the county’s three juvenile halls.

Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) would try to provide more routine screening with AB 2228. It would remove a loophole from current law, which says that evaluation is required only “to the extent resources are available.”

Los Angeles County usually intervenes only in a crisis. In the worst cases, it simply tries to keep children alive until their release. Arroyo estimated that only 10% of wards have their mental health needs met.

In extreme cases--such as the the girl in Central Juvenile Hall who mutilates herself with pencils and staples--treatment has included physical restraints and drugging. Yet Arroyo says isolation may be the worst treatment for such youths, perhaps even intensifying their symptoms.

Overwhelmed juvenile hall staff often recommend transfer to a mental health facility.

But where?

After Camarillo State Hospital closed in 1997, Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk agreed to pick up some of the slack. The average wait to get in is about nine months.

A patched-together alternative is County-USC Medical Center. But it can hold only six juveniles, and in less than ideal conditions. It’s even difficult to keep the disturbed juveniles away from the phone, Arroyo said.

“If you have a kid who happens to have a severe mental illness but also happens to be a gangbanger, you’re not going to want this kid to communicate with folks who are more than likely to get this kid into some kind of mischief,” he said.

A five-county mental health center built three years ago in Orange County has never opened because of a shortage of funds to hire staff. One of the three bills--AB 2104 by Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin (D-Duncans Mills)--would provide up to half of the money to operate such centers.

In the meantime, even Juvenile Court judges find themselves frustrated. In Alameda County earlier this year, one judge sent a 17-year-old boy to an adult psychiatric unit after the boy tried to kill himself three times in juvenile hall, despite being under 24-hour watch.

Psychiatric records documented his mental illness dating back to a nervous breakdown at age 8, according to the boy’s attorney, Freda Perel. But because he is charged with a serious crime--attempted murder for discharging a gun when stopped by police--no adolescent facilities would take him.

“They treated him like they would treat any delinquent,” Perel said. “He was in such bad shape--smearing feces all over himself, hallucinating--and they were not equipped to deal with that.”