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The Nebraska Safe Haven law was a very badly written law and the results were predictable. The law was very open ended and allowed parents to surrender children up to the age of 18. Then intent was to allow birth mothers the opportunity to relinquish a child they could not care for and prevent them from making other deadly decisions. Legislators could not agree on an upper age limit so they left it open to say “a child” and now teenagers are being surrendered.
There is a bright spot to this very bad law. USA Today ran an article on this law pointing out something we are all too well are of. The lack of mental health services for families who need it most.
More information is coming to light about the families who made this choice and it appears that these are frustrated parents with children who need mental health services but they cannot get access to them. Some of the children have suicidal and homicidal behaviors, Bi-Polar disorder and Schizophrenia.
The article points out the issue that many of us know too well. In order to get GOOD mental health services for your child, you have to turn the child over to social services or foster care. This is not a good option for anyone involved.
The readers commenting on the article are clearly divided. Some readers truly get what we struggle with in getting mental health services for our children. Other comments stem along the lines of just love them more. One reader suggested that having a stay-at-home-mom would help the kids. Sorry, I have been an at-home mom for the last six years and it hasn’t done a thing to cure my son’s mental health issues.
One comment in the article by Todd Landry of the Department of Health and Human Services really got my goat.
“In the other cases,” Landry says, “the youths were having behavioral or emotional struggles that the parent could not or did not want to handle.” He says help is available but adds, “Parents need to take responsibility.”
I agree. Parents need to take responsibility, but what about when the parents are responsible and search for services for their children only to be turned down, work with practitioners who don’t get it, or it is out of their financial reach? We worked with a horrible psychiatrist for a number of years, only because we couldn’t find someone who knew what we were dealing with. He saw my son for 15 minutes every six months. Only when we found our attachment therapist did we find a psychiatrist who understood all the issues involved with my son. This didn’t happen until four years after my son joined the family. Four years of struggling and never finding the right services.
I hope USA Today continues with a series of articles to shed further light onto what parents go through. Good mental health services are not easy to come by.
