Counselor for troubled youth in South Dakota: SD is not providing adequate mental-health care for young people
I personally have a child in my family that has been sent to Georgia and Missouri for inpatient mental health care, yet no family member should have to be apart from their loved ones, which can cause abandonment trauma to the child. I have seen it because South Dakota does not have a long-term inpatient mental-health facility for children. We are sending our children out of South Dakota to get mental-health care.
It’s vital that we start looking at a project that will help our children within our state, not sending them away. Mental health is just one of the epidemics we face here in our country. We need to work together to solve this problem right here at home.
Avera has a short-term mental health facility where a child can stay for one or two weeks, but then they are released, essentially kicked out. I would like to see our state do more for our children needing mental health services.
Gov. Kristi Noem’s budget proposal includes $1.2 million in additional ongoing funding for regional mental-health facilities, but there’s nothing for the children. Can’t some of that money be used to help our children who have mental health needs to open a long-term facility for our youth right here at home?
My suggestion would be to start out small with just a few children. Once this small group is well managed it could then allow more patients. I would also like to see a program for wilderness therapy. We live in a beautiful state, and it would show our children how nature has healing benefits, both physically and mentally.
Another issue we face with childcare facilities in general is high employee turnover because of the low hourly pay. To find the right people for these roles we need to be paying them more, at the least a living wage.
I work for a lower-entry treatment facility with Department of Social Services and Department of Correction kids. I took an $8-an-hour pay cut to be a youth counselor. I wanted this experience to understand more about how these facilities are operated, and I knew I could make a difference in these kids’ lives.
But when the pay is so low you will seldom get the right people to help these children. When these kids see employees working days or only weeks on the job, then soon moving on (because of the inadequate pay), this is yet another abandonment they must process.
Our inpatient mental health facility for adults in Yankton (at the Lewis and Clark Behavior Health Services center, seen above in a public domain photo posted on wikimedia commons) is full with no beds available, so you can imagine the need for our children to have a long-term inpatient facility. If we are seeing more youth needing mental-health care, can we not see how this will lead to more adult bed shortages in the future if we don’t help them now? This has become a South Dakota crisis.
To witness a child going through these out-of-state facilities with undesired results, I would have to say it’s because the family has been taken physically from the child. Let’s recall how President-elect Donald Trump’s family separation policy at the border worked out.
How can it help to limit time with the support system these children will return to once they are released? If there was a place in South Dakota for long-term inpatient mental health for youth we would see increases in family support, success of the treatment program and better mental health care for our future families in South Dakota.
Krystal Jones of Sioux Falls worked in banking for 12 years investigating fraud. Recently, she started a new role being a youth counselor for troubled youth. She also is a women’s rights advocate supporting surrogacy and Dakotans for Health in Pierre. This essay originally appeared on Change Agents of South Dakota.
