Current Events > Alaska uses for profit mental hospital for foster kids who shouldn't be there

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.adn.com/opinions/2018/06/05/alaska-uses-a-for-profit-mental-hospital-to-hold-foster-kids-who-shouldnt-be-there/

PLEASE NOTE: this is an Opinion Article

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints.

Children are locked in an Anchorage mental hospital without justification because child welfare authorities don't know what else to do with them.

These other sources say North Star's prison-like, acute-care units routinely house and drug many children whose real need is consistent discipline and a caring home. They also describe chaotic, understaffed units where injuries are common and teens are controlled by threats, sedation and restraint.

... OCS can send a minor under its control to intake staff, who assess the youth and then call an independent psychiatrist for an admission decision. In those cases, the doctor usually never sees the patient or reads the assessment until after the admission, she said.

North Star has financial incentives to admit children to the hospital.

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someone should rescue them

This isn't new. I have a relative who worked as a teacher in a public special education school in Canada who said that the whole thing was just corrupt. Like, there were kids who were diagnosed with mental illnesses without the doctor having even seen them. What those kids had in common was that they came from very poor and/or immigrant families who couldn't defend them. Apparently they were receiving money from the government proportional to how many students they had, so they just tried to get as many as possible
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