Mississippi Sued on Behalf of Mentally Ill Children

JACKSON, Miss. - Mississippi forces mentally ill children through a lonely cycle of restrictive psychiatric facilities when community-based programs would better serve their needs, a youth advocacy group said Wednesday in a federal lawsuit.

The Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law in Washington D.C. and the Mississippi Youth Justice Project, part of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Jackson on behalf of four people, ranging in age from 12 to 17.

The youths are identified only by their initials in court records.

"Children in Mississippi with behavioral and emotional problems face a rigid, facility-based mental health system that both ignores and exacerbates their needs," the lawsuit said. "In order to access intensive mental health services in Mississippi, children must either deteriorate to the point of crisis required for involuntary hospitalization, or submit to unnecessary institutionalization."

The lawsuit seeks class action status to include potentially hundreds of Medicaid-eligible children with behavioral or emotional disorders.

The goal is to force Mississippi to create "a more robust system of home- and community-based services for children with significant mental health needs," SPLC attorney Vanessa Carroll told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Messages left at the offices of state officials named as defendants in the lawsuit, including Gov. Haley Barbour, weren't immediately returned.

One plaintiff in the lawsuit, described as 17-year-old J.B., has spent 13 years in the system. The lawsuit claims his experience is similar to other youth who are torn from their families and sent to institutions, sometimes far from home.

J.B has been "hospitalized at least five times, placed in six different foster homes, five residential treatment facilities, more than ten group homes and shelters; and locked in a secure detention facility on at least twelve occasions," the lawsuit said.

On at least one occasion, J.B. was forced into an institution not because of his own problems, but because his "mother had resumed drinking and could not offer a stable environment," the lawsuit said.

It also claims the only reason he's still in a secure facility now is to get job training, something that could be done in a community-based setting if it was available.

More than 1,300 Mississippi youngsters were placed in a psychiatric facility or therapeutic group home in 2009, the lawsuit said. And some 700 children were committed to a state hospital in 2008.

"The great majority of these children could and should have been served instead in their own homes or in a therapeutic foster home," according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit, among other things, seeks a declaration that Mississippi has unlawfully failed to comply with the Medicaid Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act and a section of the Rehabilitation Act.

It names as defendants: Barbour; Robert Robinson, director of the Mississippi Division of Medicaid; Patricia Ainsworth, chairwoman of the Mississippi Board of Mental Health; and Ed Legrand, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Mental Health.

The Mississippi Youth Justice Project has sued the state before, including a lawsuit over allegedly frightening conditions at Mississippi's juvenile correction center. Columbia Training School for girls was shut down in the wake of those allegations.