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Christy Mathews (left) has resisted giving up custody to get care for her daughter Lauren.
"I don't want her to think we're giving her away." (Michael E. Keating photos)
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Lauren Mathews, 15, at the Hamilton County Special School in Norwood. She has been hospitalized repeatedly for mental illness, including violent moods and voices in her head. Her family can't afford long-term psychiatric help.
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| KEY FINDINGS |
| The Enquirer found that Ohio's system for treating children with mental illness is entrenched in bureaucracy and plagued by abuse. Our investigation found:
• Insurance plans that pay for other illnesses severely limit what they pay to treat mental illness.
• To get public help, thousands of parents who can't afford treatment give custody of their kids to the government.
• Some children sent to treatment centers are abused, molested, overdrugged or left to live in wretched conditions.
• Shortages of psychiatrists, staff and treatment centers mean long waits for care - or none at all.
• No one's in charge. Two state agencies and hundreds of county agencies confound even the people running them.
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Christy Mathews struggled for years to pay for treatment for her mentally ill daughter, a 15-year-old who burns and cuts herself and last year threatened to stab her mom with a steak knife.
Desperate and afraid, Mathews tried to get Hamilton County officials to pay for Lauren to live in a psychiatric facility. A social worker finally told her she could get help - if Mathews gave up custody of her daughter to the county.
"I shouldn't be forced to give my daughter up to get her the help she needs, but that's how the system works," she says. "What you have to go through is unreal."
Mathews refused to turn over Lauren, but thousands of parents in Ohio and elsewhere have been forced to give in.
In the past three years, Ohio parents who've run out of insurance or money have given up custody of as many as 1,800 children so the government will pay to treat their mental illness, a Cincinnati Enquirer investigation has found.
Even then, kids don't always get the help they need. Ohio counties place more than 7,000 children a year in centers where some are abused, molested, improperly drugged and left in wretched conditions, an examination of inspection records, court documents and interviews reveals. .
At least 38 of Ohio's 88 counties acknowledge taking children from parents, who give up their rights to say where their kids are sent for treatment, how long they stay or even what kind of medicine they are given.
County officials say that obtaining custody is the only way they can tap federal money to cover treatment costs that run as high as $1,000 a day. But not even Michael Hogan, director of Ohio's Department of Mental Health, defends the practice. "We must stop trading custody for care. It's terrible," he says. "A civilized society should not do this."
Trading custody for care is a "travesty," adds Gayle Channing Tenenbaum, a lobbyist for the Ohio Public Children Services Association.
"As a state," she says, "we've totally given up on these kids."
A 'terrible problem'
More than 86,000 children in Ohio are mentally ill, and many parents find that insurance money for treatment runs out long before their kids get better. Unlike coverage for physical diseases and ailments, policies typically limit benefits for mental illness to 20 to 30 days a year.
That's usually far too little. So parents frequently spend years bouncing from one agency to another - only to be told by each that no money or treatment options are available. .
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