"Children in Maryland's foster care system are languishing in psychiatric hospitals even when they no longer require hospital care," says this segment of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday. "The state doesn't have enough space to place them elsewhere." The segment features an interview with a teenager in care in the U.S. state of Maryland who was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. "A judge ruled in late October that it was not medically necessary for her to stay in the hospital. But the local department of social services responsible for her care doesn't have another place for her to go. She missed Thanksgiving, Christmas and her birthday. She hasn't been outside. She has no school, except for an hour and a half of tutoring each day."
Carroll McCabe, leader of the mental health division of the Maryland Public Defender's Office, also says she noticed that "social services workers were increasingly taking children from foster care placements to emergency rooms. From there, doctors sent them to inpatient psychiatric hospitals." Once evaluated in these hospitals, some of the children were found to have no mental illnesses at all. But "the Department of Social Services would refuse to pick up the children because they said they didn't have any place else to put the children."
The segment also includes a brief clip of an interview with Marcia Lowry, the director of A Better Childhood, a national advocacy organization who says that states are leaving children not just in psychiatric hospitals but also in homeless shelters and juvenile detention facilities.