Op Ed: School Children Need Mental Health Services (US)

May 12, 2011

As a school counselor, I read with interest the recent article (April 16) outlining funding of mental health services for inmates of the Gre ene County Jail. This Department of Justice program unquestionably is needed to help meet the overwhelming needs of those who are incarcerated and has the potential to identify hidden issues and provide much needed treatment.

At the same time, there is an urgent need for mental health services among school-aged children. In my experience, there are growing numbers of students with undiagnosed mental health conditions, students who are without necessary mental health medications and students in need of counseling. These factors impact learning, social development, family interactions and all phases of the lives of the students affected and those with which they interact.

The obstacles to delivery of adequate mental health care for school-aged children are varied. First, for many families the transportation that is prerequisite for keeping an appointment is not available. In the area where I work as school counselor, a drive of up to 50 miles is required to access mental health services. Another obstacle for many families is that they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid but do not have adequate resources to fund private health insurance. Additional complications are: reluctance to make contact with a mental health provider and/or to make an appointment, resistance to counseling/mental health treatment and lack of consistency in keeping appointments.

I believe early intervention produces the most hope for a good outcome. By allocating funds to provide mental health services for children, proactively, the prospect of a productive life is much greater than when attempts are undertaken in reaction to criminal behavior. As the old adage goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

School-based mental health care has the potential to offer services to students during the school day eliminating the transportation obstacle and also providing for consistency in treatment. With a proactive philosophical fo undation, acting earlier rather than later, as a guiding principle, the necessary money can be appropriated with the reasonable expectation that early intervention will have huge payoffs that correlate to a reduction in the prison population.

School-based mental health care offers [a] new model for delivery of mental health care that broadens the scope of the public school and the services it provides. The benefactors potentially are the treated students, their families, their classmates, the school and society as a whole by turning the lives of those at risk for future legal difficulties around so they don’t further crowd our already overburdened prison system.

In the words of Victor Hugo, “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”