by Callie Ferguson
The Bangor Daily News

Unable to access timely treatment at homes and with their families, kids and teenagers were forced into more institutional, restrictive environments instead, they wrote, including windowless hospital emergency departments, inpatient psychiatric units, residential treatment facilities, and even Long Creek Youth Development Center, Maine’s only youth prison.

Do you know a child who needs mental health services?
The lawyers, who said they had watched this situation unfold countless times over the previous years, argued that the pattern of unnecessary institutionalization they were describing amounted to widespread violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act — and that Maine officials, despite clear evidence of this prolonged crisis, had not acted with enough urgency to fix it.

“The State has been aware of these issues for years,” the lawyers wrote in their complaint to the Justice Department, a copy of which the Bangor Daily News obtained through a public records request. They hoped the federal government would intervene by enforcing federal disability rights law, thereby forcing a more robust network of children’s mental health services into fruition.

More than five years after that complaint was lodged and investigated, the Justice Department and Gov. Janet Mills announced Tuesday that the state and federal government had reached an agreement in court to fix problems in the children’s behavioral health system, a major development that imposed the most comprehensive and enforceable plan to date.

While many advocates warned that it could still take years for children and families to see real improvements, they said the agreement is a necessary and hopeful step toward holding the state accountable to ending a crisis that has only seemed to worsen in recent years.
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