New Program for Mentally Ill, Nonviolent Youth

A new care program for mentally ill nonviolent children under the custody of the juvenile probation system has been established at The University of Texas-Harris County Psychiatric Center. The program was unveiled at an April 12 press conference by Harris County Judge Robert Eckels, Juvenile Probation Department Director Elmer Bailey, UT-HCPC Executive Director Dr. Robert W. Guynn, and administrator Lois Moore.

UT-HCPC's new Sub-Acute Adolescent Unit is slated to start receiving patients early this month. It will accommodate 16 youths, ages 13 through 18, who would be better served in a mental health setting than in a detention facility. The unit will be staffed by certified mental health professionals, under the direction of faculty of The University of Texas Medical School at Houston Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, also headed by Dr. Guynn.

Harris County Commissioners formally approved the program's first year budget of $1.9 million last month.

Until now, the only place juvenile offenders held by the county could be incarcerated was at the Juvenile Probation Department facility on West Dallas Street. Those with mental health problems held at the detention center receive little psychiatric treatment and are often subject to extreme precautions to protect them from harming themselves.

Estimates are that about 25 percent of all juveniles detained by the Juvenile Probation Department have some type of mental illness. The situation became critical in 1996 when the Texas Legislature, in a move to deter juvenile crime, mandated more juveniles be prosecuted and held in local detention centers.

"This has been a major need for our county for a long time," said Eckels. "Children with mental illness should not be held in a detention setting - they need a therapeutic environment. I consider this new program one of the major achievements of the department and county during my career."

For more than a year, Dr. Guynn, Moore and Bailey have worked together to plan the program, housed in a UT-HCPC unit. The new program will provide individual and group counseling, family therapy, anger management and other treatment strategies in an inpatient hospital setting.

When juveniles leave the program, they will be referred to a similarly structured outpatient program, either at UT-HCPC's Behavioral Health Services Outpatient Clinic or at other county mental health clinics.

"We recognize violent and aggressive behavior among our youth is one of the major public health problems," said Dr. Guynn, "and we also recognize that this tide cannot be stemmed by putting juveniles in jail when what they really need is medical and psychological care. Many of the faculty members in the Department of Psychiatry have national reputations in the diagnosis and care of impulsive and aggressive behavior."

"The majority of the funding," says Moore, "will go toward hiring competent staff to work with these children. Juvenile probation officers are not trained to work with children who suffer from mental disorders. We at UT-HCPC are the county's chief inpatient mental health facility and there is no better place for these children to be."

"Without this program, we are putting these children at risk for re-entering the justice system, dropping out of school, committing acts of violence and crime and wasting their lives," said Bailey. "This is something we as a community cannot afford."

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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