Children’s Mental Health

A federal grant of up $12 million will allow Kentucky to provide comprehensive behavioral health and social services for almost 1,500 children and youth in the state’s child welfare system.

The four-year grant of up to $3 million a year is intended to improve long-term outcomes for youth through age 21.

The Imprint has recently published dozens of articles exploring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on foster youth, and how they perceive and participate in this country’s current reckoning with systemic and institutional racism.

Will Lightbourne, a longtime director of state and local social services, emerged from retirement last month to become the director of the California Department of Health Care Services – just as record-breaking coronavirus cases tripled in the state.

Consonant with its expanded approach to developing, promoting and supporting children in the child welfare system, the recently renamed Family Focused Treatment Association has hired its first executive director to lead the nonprofit’s transition to tackling a broader mandate under a new, landmark federal law.

“Although the COVID-19 crisis is, in the first instance, a physical health crisis, it has the seeds of a major mental health crisis as well, if action is not taken.”

So begins the United Nations’ Policy Brief: COVID-19 and the Need for Action on Mental Health, released May 13, 2020.

The siblings – a teen and a pre-teen – waited for good news that never came. Their mother was sick, and doctors suspected it was COVID-19, the potentially deadly disease barreling through New York. 

As New York enters its third month of sheltering at home, mental health counselors serving vulnerable children and families in the foster care system are racing to adapt their tried-and-true methods to a virtual connection.

Direct care staff who work with youth are our most immediate front line of support for youth who require additional adult intervention in school-based and residential environments. However, through no fault of their own, these individuals are on average the most undertrained, undersupervised, underpaid and seemingly undervalued paid professionals our youth come in contact with.

Following pressure from foster youth advocates, legislation that would have scaled back patient protections for Californians prescribed the most powerful psychiatric drugs will no longer be heard by the state Legislature this year.