GUESTWORK | Toni Hoy
Regarding your Aug. 11 cover story, “When adoption goes wrong: Giving up custody to get kids the mental health care they need,” by Patrick Yeagle: A better title for this article would be “Trading custody rights for mental health care.”
Our adoption did not “go wrong.” We love and unconditionally accept our adoptive children despite dealing with chronic issues related to prenatal brain damage and preadoptive abuse. Children with subsidized adoptions are entitled to “medically necessary” services to age 21, under the “Early, Periodic, Screening, Diagnostic, and Treatment (EPSDT)” provision of Medicaid law, the federal statute referenced in our lawsuit. Violating this mandate, Illinois denies treatment to children, under Medicaid, awarded to them as part of a special needs adoption. After being denied these services, child mental health care defaults to the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Both systems are uneducated and ill-equipped to process complex mental health cases.
The Department of Children and Family Services offers therapists to adoptive families. When the child’s psychiatrist recommends residential treatment, DCFS fails to provide services in a timely manner, prompting a psychiatric lockout. Then adoption preservation services end. DCFS processes these families through investigative and juvenile court systems they same way they treat abusive parents.
The Juvenile Court Act requires that parents facing the barbaric practice of trading custody rights for health care be charged with neglect. As parents defend themselves against false allegations in court, investigators are routinely reprimanded with mere non-disciplinary counseling.
In your article, DCFS spokesman Kendall Marlowe refers to “normal” teen problems such as sexuality, identity and attachment, resulting in common teen issues such as truancy, verbal aggression and defiance. On the contrary, adoptive parents face extreme problems such as Reactive Attachment Disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and prenatal substance abuse effect. Violent and aggressive acts, such as chronic threats of killing self or others, self-mutilation, hiding weapons, damaging property, and setting fire to their homes, hardly qualify as “normal” teen problems, as Mr. Marlowe suggests. In denying services, DCFS places siblings, schoolmates, and the community at risk of danger.
DCFS could provide temporary funding while aiding in sorting out funding issues. After psychiatric lockout, DCFS replaces par ents with parent substitutes, strangers to a child with a bonding/attachment predisposition, inhibiting therapeutic progress. While therapists seek to strengthen familial bonds, the “system” is simultaneously destroying them. DCFS and juvenile courts overlook this critical therapeutic setback.
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