New York Let Residences for Kids With Serious Mental Health Problems Vanish. Desperate Families Call

New York Let Residences for Kids With Serious Mental Health Problems Vanish. Desperate Families Call the Cops Instead.

Sara Taylor felt the knot in her stomach pull tighter even before she answered the phone. The call was from the hospital taking care of her 11-year-old, Amari. And she knew what they were going to say: Amari was being discharged. Come pick her up right away.

Taylor was sure that Amari — that’s her middle name — wasn’t ready to come home. Less than two weeks earlier, in March 2020, she threatened to stab her babysitter with a knife and then she ran into the street. Panicked, the babysitter called 911. Police arrived, restraining Amari and packing her into an ambulance, which rushed her to the mental health emergency room at Strong Memorial Hospital, not far from her home in Rochester, New York.

This had all become a sickeningly familiar routine. Amari had struggled since she was little, racked by a terrible fear that Taylor — who is her great-aunt and has raised her for most of her life — would leave her and not come back. She often woke up screaming from nightmares about someone hurting her family. During the day, she had ferocious tantrums, breaking things, attacking Taylor and threatening to hurt herself.

Taylor searched desperately for help, signing Amari up for therapy and putting her on waitlists for intensive, in-home mental health services that are supposed to be available to New York kids with serious psychiatric conditions. But the programs were full, and it took months to get in.

During Amari’s worst episodes, Taylor had little choice but to call 911 — which Taylor, who is Black, said made her nauseous with fear. She and Amari live just a few miles from the block where Daniel Prude, a Black man with a history of paranoia and erratic behavior, was hooded and pinned to the ground by police until he stopped breathing, in a 2020 incident that began after his brother called 911 for help. Prude died days later at the hospital. In 2021, a video went viral that showed Rochester police officers handcuffing a 9-year-old Black girl and pepper-spraying her in the face while she sat, sobbing, in the back of a squad car. Every time police entered her home, Taylor was terrified that Amari would end up hurt or dead.

“We know that Black children with mental illness are criminalized,” Taylor said. “When you have men with guns coming into your house to handle your sick child, that’s frightening.”

https://www.propublica.org/article/mental-health-beds-new-york-children-disappearing

Mental illness in children is REAL