To wrap up Mental Health Awareness Month, we are highlighting a story from an MST-Psychiatric case

Jenna Smith was worried. Something was wrong with her son. She had suspected a problem for several years, but now there was no denying it—Rodney was ill. It was his mind. Jenna first noticed symptoms three years earlier, around Rodney’s 14th birthday. At that time, he was having trouble sleeping and would wander the halls of their apartment late at night, talking to himself. He stopped cleaning his room and often neglected his personal hygiene. 

May is Mental Health Awareness Month—a time devoted to promoting mental-health well-being. This year youth suicide and self-harm are top focus.

Seven years ago, tragedy struck Woodbury, Minn., when five suicides occurred within the first six months of the year. “After the last suicide, my community was grieving and broken,” said Dr. Renee Penticoff, co-founder and president of the Suicide Prevention Collaborative (SPC)  “I felt I had to do something.” And indeed she did.

Dr. Renee Penticoff, second from the left, with volunteers from the SPC

Film highlights the dangers of incarcerating youth with adults 

Imagine your 17-year-old daughter got in a school fight with a 16-year-old classmate. Hair pulling, scratching. No weapons involved. What do you think is the appropriate consequence for such behavior? Suspension from school? Grounded? Not allowed to attend the prom or other school activities? What about community service? Restitution? Probation? Think that may be going too far for a youthful mistake? Well, depending on the state you live in, that 17-year-old could be charged with felony child abuse and incarcerated in an adult correctional facility. As a parent, you would have no control over that process.

Girls are different from boys—an obvious statement that isn’t so obvious in much of the juvenile-justice system. In the past, girls historically made up a smaller percentage of the juvenile justice system. However, the number of girls entering the justice system is on the rise.

As pointed out in an exhaustive report by Francine T. Sherman Annie Balck¹ (in partnership with the National Crittenton Foundation and the National Women’s Law Center), there is an inequality of treatment often from the get-go. Judges find abused young women from traumatic backgrounds in front of them and will put them into the system to “protect” them.

At all points, starting with arrest and going through disposition, the authors of the report said, “The system is structured to pull girls in, rather than to use available ‘off-ramps’ to divert them to more appropriate interventions.”