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Maine’s failure to provide for its disabled children could scarcely be under any more official scrutiny – and still, years on, families are waiting for critical support, waiting for repair of system broken beyond recognition. Those of you who read this newspaper last Sunday will need little reminding of our vividly reported front-page story (“ ‘We’re suffering here’: Maine families of children with disabilities wait for help,” Sept. 29).
The stories of the Unangst and Watson families – living in Winthrop and Gray, respectively – hammered home the day-to-day hardship of a life spent on a waiting list for behavioral health care; waiting for in-home services for their children, in particular, the services that offer basic stability and routine to families who are otherwise faced with very little. The grit and bravery of families like these, forced to get by alone without help in Maine, is nothing short of astonishing. “I live in constant fear that he’s going to die,” Sue Unangst said of her 12-year-old son, Bruce, who has level 3 autism spectrum disorder and other behavioral diagnoses.
“He’s so high-need, and it’s just me.” Andy and Eliza Watson of Gray adopted their son Hunter, today a behavioral health in-patient at Spring Harbor Hospital in Westbrook when he was 5. The Watsons, who lost access to a schedule of sustained in-home services one year ago, believe that Hunter’s hospitalization would have been avoided if that care had been kept up.
Unangst’s husband Eric, an Air Force veteran, took his own life in 2014 after what she called a “fight with depression.” “All he wanted was to be a good dad,” Unangst told the paper. In order to be good parents to their children – whose needs are myriad, complex and ever-changing – parents like Unangst and the Watsons rely heavily on state support.
And they’re not getting that support. Almost a month ago, the U.S.
Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit against Maine for “unnecessarily segregating children with behavioral health disabilities in hospitals, residential facilities and a state-operated juvenile detention facility.” The facility is Long Creek Youth Development Center, Maine’s only youth detention facility, which the DOJ said in a 2022 letter that Maine was using as a “de facto children’s psychiatric facility.” Hospital emergency rooms around the state have wound up serving the same dismal purpose.
In 2023, according to a powerful op-ed in these pages by Dr. Andrew Powell, senior medical director of hospital services with Maine Medical Center, 345 children and teens spent more than 48 hours in one of MaineHealth’s nine emergency rooms awaiting discharge to appropriate behavioral health services. “The average length of stay for those children was five days,” Powell wrote.
“Imagine experiencing mental health issues and being stuck in a windowless, bare room for five or more days. There is nothing therapeutic about such an experience. In fact, it is psychologically harmful for children to be isolated and alone, particularly when they are at their most vulnerable.
“Our failure to provide appropriate care and treatment to these young people only adds to the burden they already carry.” In response to the filing of the DOJ lawsuit last month, a DHHS spokesperson said the agency “agreed with the findings” and that the failings of the state’s behavioral health system went back “decades.” The same humility was nowhere to be found at a news conference at the University of Southern Maine last month, at which Gov.
Janet Mills, with whose administration the buck stops (no matter how ransacked a system it inherited from the administration prior), brushed off a reporter’s questions about disabled Maine children left with nowhere to go. “I’m not going to comment on (ongoing) litigation,” Mills replied, before seemingly daring to defend the record. “We’ve been talking to the Department of Justice for a couple years about this matter, and we’ve also pumped a half a billion dollars into behavioral health management in recent years.
” To which we say: Keep pumping, then. Until we see a meaningful change in the system, until resourcing is arranged so that it does not give way and put people at risk, the quantum of the state’s investment is utterly irrelevant. Lest we forget, two years of work by the Mills administration to address the initial allegations of the DOJ culminated in the state getting sued.
The state has to take ownership of this wholly unacceptable reality – and go to whatever extraordinary lengths required to put it to rights. Opinion: Children should not be languishing in hospital emergency rooms Our View: Mills administration’s effort to fix child welfare system is failing We invite you to add your comments. We encourage a thoughtful exchange of ideas and information on this website.
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