The problem is lack of imagination, not lack of mental health care, at least in Ohio juvenile detention.

Perhaps in the facility you work in. That’s not the rule across the board. VBH, for instance, is pretty nasty, and most of their clients are sent there by juvenile courts.

I don’t mean to suggest that the kids they deal with are angels. These are some pretty nasty kids, ones that probably will spend the rest of their lives in prison - but with the proper treatment, they could do well in prison. With improper treatment, they end up raging animals.

You know what happens when a kid gets mad and holds his breath until he turns blue? He passes out, reflexes take over, and he starts breathing again. In Columbus, a 13-year-old boy who wasn’t supposed to be left alone was found dead, supposedly a suicide by drowning in 8 inches of water in a bathtub.

Apparently in Cincinnati, a resident started choking on her own vomit, an hour after eating. They ignored her for about an hour before calling for an ambulance, and she died.

A teenaged girl in Ohio, not to be left alone, was allowed an unsupervised smoke break. She picked up glass from a broken window and cut her wrists in a suicide attempt. It was the next day before they bothered to take her to the emergency room. Why were they allowing a teenager to smoke? Why was there broken glass lying around? That’s outrageous.

Here in Ephrata, a boy was restrained because he was “unruly”. It was cold, and he wanted to wear his hoody. Nope, that wasn’t allowed. They put him on the floor, face down, held his arms back, and two, count ‘em, two workers climbed on his back. Get off me, I can’t breathe, he cried. They didn’t get off, and he died. The coroner said he had an enlarged heart and that’s why he died - but he had an EKG just a week earlier that showed no problems at all. The DA said it was accidental death. But the local newspaper got someone to hack into the coroner’s computer, the state started investigating the coroner, the DA went in and confiscated hard drives at the newspaper. The coroner lost his primary, the DA decided against running….

That was the second death in about 3 months at Ephrata, but I don’t know anyone who worked there when the first one occurred. They tell me that the administration retaliated against staffers filing incident reports of staff beating, raping, or ignoring legitimate needs of residents, or ignoring residents raping each other.

I’m sorry if this post upset some readers. It upsets me, and I don’t know the kids, I just hear story after story, second-hand. Maybe if enough people get upset, though, we can do something. This isn’t something that oughta happen in America.

The problem is lack of imagination, not lack of mental health care, at least in Ohio juvenile detention. Actual longer-term lock-up-ees, i suspect we slide into the demographics you describe for prison, but i don’t work that side of the block.

On the other hand, on this side of the block, a preponderance of my kids are angry and acting out because of untreated, self-medicated, poorly managed mental health on the part of their parents/guardians. We screen and refer for depression when we can identify it, but they’re angry that their parents aren’t parenting and that they can’t be kids . . . my words, of course, not theirs. The biggest frustration of working juvenile justice is the limited degree to which we can use kids’ offenses to push the responsible adults to look at treatment or counseling or rehab, even when all of us up to the judge can tell the dad’s (likely) drug use is the trigger for the kid’s antisocial behavior (school truancy, vandalism, fighting on the bus, shoplifting).

I don’t think so, Jeff. Kids are in confinement, and under strict supervision all the time. They don’t call it humiliation; they call it school.

Some adult prisoners are psychopaths, and some are people who made bad decisions, but a majority of all adults in prison are mentally or emotionally ill. If you drink or use recreational drugs once in a while, it’s to have fun, but these folks are often self-medicating for clinical depression or other mental disorders. (People hear “depression” and they think sadness, but clinical depression involves sleep disorders, digestive disorders, aches and pains, lack of concentration, memory problems, anhedonia (inability to enjoy anything), and inability to think, much more than sadness.) And the same is true of kids.

It’s not that being locked up makes someone want to commit suicide. They commit suicide for the same reason they ended in the lockup - because they have problems between the ears.

Those who have family members or friends commit suicide often torture themselves, wondering if he committed suicide because of something they said or did, or if they could have said something or done something to have prevented that death. They shouldn’t feel guilty. Suicide is a pain-killer - and if someone is in enough pain to kill himself, anything you could possibly say or do is going to be pretty inconsequential in comparison.

Of those who are hospitalized for depression, 60% will end up being hospitalized a second time. Of those hospitalized twice, 80% will end up being hospitalized a third time. And a third of all who are hospitalized at least once for depression end up succeeding in killing themselves. (While 83% of all statistics are made up on the spot, those particular statistics came from DSM-III.)

Vigiliance, and compassion. That’s all we’ve got most days. And an adult imagination, and the ability to share it productively.