When Delicia was 4 years old, she lunged at another girl in day care without provocation and scratched the side of her face all the way up to the eye. The police came, and Delicia was expelled.
In the six years since then, Delicia has been kicked out of schools and residential facilities for attacking staff members and destroying property. She has tried to jump off a second floor balcony, attempted to cut her wrists and almost jumped out of a car on the freeway. More recently, she’s made death threats against her mother, Natalie Jonsson.
Jonsson took Delicia to the emergency room 30 times, at different hospitals across Southern California. She was ultimately placed in a psychiatric bed 13 of those times, but only after waiting in the ER for anywhere from one to four days, sometimes restrained or under sedation.
“I can’t even describe the fear and pain of trying to keep your kid from killing themselves in front of you,” Jonsson says. “And I can’t get her any help.”
Jonsson could be the spokesperson for many parents struggling to cope with kids who suffer from severe psychological problems. Across Orange County, there are not enough pediatric psychiatrists, counselors therapists or inpatient psychiatric beds to cope with mental illness among children.
There are just 32 psychiatric beds in all of Orange County for the roughly 725,000 residents under age 18. For children under 12, the shortage is particularly acute: There is not one single bed.
Mental health resources for children outside of a hospital setting are also in short supply, experts say.
“There are parents with adolescents and children who have bipolar disorder or are actively hallucinating, and there’s nowhere to take them,” says Kristen Pankratz, educational programs coordinator at the Orange County chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. “This is a huge problem.”
One in five children will suffer psychiatric problems during childhood, and half of adults with mental illness had their first symptoms before age 14, says Heather Huszti, chief psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Orange County.
Yet only about a third of California children with emotional difficulties had even one mental health visit in the previous year, a 2013 study by the California HealthCare Foundation shows. In Orange County, 7.3 percent of children 17 and under have a “severe emotional disturbance,” the study says.
For those children, particularly the ones under 12, the options are poor. If they need to be hospitalized, they have to go to L.A., San Bernardino or San Diego.
Jolie Tuchscher, whose 14-year-old son Drew has suffered with serious mental illness for years, knows this all too well. About two years ago, Drew became agitated over something relatively minor and ran toward the knife drawer, saying he wanted to kill himself.
Jolie managed to get the knife away from Drew, and drove him to the emergency room at Kaiser Permanente, where they stayed from about 10 at night until noon the next day.
They sat the whole time in a room with a bed and a guard posted outdoors, waiting to find a psych bed. They finally found one in Torrance, about an hour drive from the Tuchschers’ home in Yorba Linda.
Mental health professionals and hospital executives know there is an urgent need for more pediatric inpatient services in Orange County, but they flinch at the expense of creating them.
“The cost of treating a child is just enormous, much more than an adult,” says Tom Loats, director of behavioral health at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange. “It is so cost-prohibitive.”
Loats cites the long hospital stays that some children require and the lack of pediatric psychiatrists and other professionals to work with them. To have a psychiatrist in the ER round the clock to expedite evaluation and treatment would cost a hospital more than $3 million a year, he figures.
“If there is going to be a child unit, there really has to be cooperation between the county and the private sector. Nobody can do it alone,” Loats says.
Some of the same economic concerns help explain why CHOC has no psychiatric beds for children, says Huszti, the chief psychologist there.
“Funding for mental health through insurance, through the state and county funds and nationally, has been cut extensively over the past 20 years,” she says, “so that it can be very difficult to pay for the services that are really required to help children.”
But she says the people at CHOC “really have recognized that this is something missing in the community and that we need to be a part of the solution.” The hospital is evaluating its role, seeking to identify potential partners and is “hoping to come up with an answer pretty quick,” she says.
Mental health workers and parents with mentally ill children understand it is important to treat kids early, before they carry their illnesses with them into adulthood.
“Brain illness does not just go away with time. It gets worse, like any disease,” says Alison Bloeser, a resident of Dana Point whose struggles with the psychiatric disorders of her son prompted her to create the Pediatric Treatment Network.
Natalie Jonsson, who moved her family from Orange County to Arizona earlier this year, knows all about brain illnesses not going away. Delicia, now 10, has not improved. She is living with a friend of the family because she has threatened her mother and physically assaulted two young half-brothers.
The mental health services in Arizona have not served her daughter any better, Jonsson says. Delicia has been on a waiting list for a psychiatric facility for more than a month.
“You have to come to terms with the fact that you might have to bury your kid,” Jonsson says. “Whether it’s killing themselves and you can’t stop it in time, or getting in an argument with the wrong person or, when they’re older, drugs, prostitution – you just don’t know.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-2440 or bwolfson@ocregister.com
