HYACINTH Samuels, mental health officer and coordinator of child and adolescent mental health services for the North East Regional Health Authority, has called for a review of the way children in state care are treated.

When the Jamaica Observer spoke with Samuels after the launch of the inaugural Child and Adolescent Mental Health Awareness Day on Wednesday May 27 at the Pan American Health Organisation, she said that many of the children’s homes operate like juvenile centres instead of care homes.

“Children do not see these places as being caring, they say that they’re being punished and oftentimes the staff are like warders,” she said.

Samuels, 62, who spent 20 years working in mental health in Birmingham, England, before returning to Jamaica, used Armadale as an example and said the facility was operated like a prison with warders, where the children weren’t receiving counselling. “They were just there and they may have received treatment.”

She added: “The abuse they get before they go into these homes continue after they go into the homes, and I can recall doing summer camp with girls from Armadale before it was burnt down and I can remember many girls coming to us and saying ‘Miss why would they lock us up when the people who are abusing us are allowed to walk free.”

According to Samuels, what Jamaica needs is a therapeutic children’s residential facility where appropriate treatment would be given to children who are abused and housed at the homes as a form of protection.

“What we’re asking for is Jamaicans to realise there’s a difference between therapy and restraint. Going into the homes is traumatising children on top of trauma already. Instead of it being like a children’s home, it is where the child should be admitted as if they are going to be admitted in hospital. We don’t have any facility, apart from Bustamante Hospital or Cornwall Regional Hospital, to admit a child who’s going through psychological problems. Instead, they have to go on the adult ward,” she said.

“If we had the therapeutic centre they could come in, all the trained professionals would be in one place, get therapy, which would be appropriate rather than when they’re going into a home,” she went on.

Samuels pointed out that the therapeutic centre would make the distinction between children who need to be locked up and those who need its services.

“Some who go into homes have actually committed a crime and there are those who have been abused in the most ways and while they may have committed a crime, it’s more in response to the post traumatic stress disorder, which many of them are going through. So, the therapeutic centre is a brilliant idea, which is bringing Jamaica’s mental health services for children in line with international standards,” she said.

Regarding the therapeutic centre Rosalee Gage-Grey, Chief Executive of the Child Development Agency (CDA) who was in attendance at the launch, responded and said plans are far advanced for the residential therapeutic centre to be in place next year.

The mental health officer and coordinator said another pressing issue is the fact that many of the care mothers are not trained with the skills needed to look after children in vulnerable situations.

“Many of the people who look after them in the homes have no training. The issues for children are very complex because they have not finished developing as yet, so the care mothers need more training,” she said.

In defence of the caregivers, she said that it is very difficult to expect the staff to treat some of the children like parents as forms of affection expected of parents, if shown to these children can be misinterpreted.

“It’s difficult to expect staff to treat them like parents in a state home. Some of the children don’t know what a parent is because they were taken away from they were very young. The staff themselves, if they try to act like parents, they would be cuddling them and could be misconstrued,” she stated.

Samuels added that the homes are short-staffed and represent a pepperpot of different situations and children have no private space to withdraw to, cope with what they’re going through personally, and as a result the homes only serve to ‘protect’ them, keep them in order and does not effectively cater to their emotional and social well-being.

Moreover, Samuels said it is often conceived that those in state care are ‘bad pickni’ and to address these issues, the region and the country by extension needs more social workers and psychologists, not just in the care homes or juvenile centres, but in schools, rural and high poverty areas, who will be able to assess children’s situation better and remove the negative label.

“These people are needed to go into homes, see why the child is not coming to school, why they are dirty and hungry. When they start to act out because of what is happening at the home it is seen as bad behaviour and oftentimes children display outward behaviour with the hope that someone will pick up. Whereas, if they were social workers they could go and check. We need more people to work with children. We have a lot of people coming out of university with psychology and social work degrees and are not being employed,” she said.

The mental health coordinator added that if social workers were in schools the government would get to pick up the ‘farm work’, ‘barrel’ and ‘Western Union’ children who’s parents have gone abroad, left them with an elder adolescent and no one knows because they don’t talk and come to school looking tidy.

“There are a lot of social things going on with children that are not being monitored. Some are not getting anything to eat, they live where there is no electricity or running water, how do they manage to do their homework?” she asked.

She added: “They are valuable to our field. At least 75 per cent of referrals for clinic are from schools who say children present aggression, violence, insolence, no respect, not performing, homosexual activity. All of that is going on and has a huge impact on what is happening with the child and can prevent them from learning. It has to be picked up. We can’t work with only what is said when they come to clinic. It would help greatly in having a better relationship with the schools and where the child is coming from.”

She explained that altogether, her region, which includes Portland, St Mary and St Ann, has 12 members of staff and for the years 2000 to 2014 they saw 10,000 children across the three parishes in child and adolescent services. This, she said, results in home visits being cancelled, and a cap being placed on the number of children they can see.

“It takes a lot to work with children. They are very special and a child will come to clinic for a month and you only get five words out of them and you have to wheel and come again,” she said.

As a result, Samuels said that more finances need to be directed to child and adolescent mental health, explaining that many times sponsorship is sought but isn’t granted.

With regards to handling issues of abuse in courts, Samuels said that there needs to be a different mindset.

“There needs to be something between the call and the abuse, instead of having a child who is abused sent to court and placed in a home. There should be a system where the child does not have to give evidence in open court, because once the evidence has been found that the child is being raped, why then does the child have to go to court and repeat it again?” asked Samuels.

“If the child does not identify the person or refuses to testify the charges don’t go forward. You know what our communities are like, they are closed, the child is frightened, families are frightened and they may refuse to go back to court because the court is unfriendly, magistrates are stern and the presence of police officers may further terrify them,” she said.

Samuels said that there needs to be a system of emergency foster parents in place that when the paperwork is being completed, children don’t have to return to the abusive situations.

“When children come here and I call CDA and they tell me I need to send a child back home and complete paperwork first. By time the paperwork is completed the child runs away. We need emergency foster parents and specialised police officers who do not just see these children as ‘bad pickni’ who needs to be locked up, because it takes a special set of skills to counsel children, not everybody can do it. We need more trained specialists,” she said.

She sugegsted that mental health officers cannot be asked to deliver first world or developed country care to vulnerable children if Jamaica was not putting certain things in place.

“We are constantly going to fall behind, we have to bring our standards up. A child will come neglected, abused or raped and from speaking with the child, quite clearly it is not appropriate for him or her to go back home, what we find is we call the police, CDA and CDA won’t take the child. Maybe they don’t have the power, I don’t know. They take a report, come out and do investigations and the child has to go back home. A lot of times what we have to do is admit the child to hospital, which then becomes the place of safety and it’s not appropriate especially for a child who’s acting out,” she stated.

If the therapeutic centre comes on stream next year, Samuels explained that part of it’s purpose will be to help children in state care transition properly into society when they come of age through a reintegration programme.

“The plan is that when the child reaches 18 after being in the therapeutic centre, they then transition into something like a halfway house, which is similar to an apartment where they learn the necessary skills needed to integrate or reintegrate into society,” she said.

Samuels added that this is necessary, especially if they have lived in a care home from they were small because “many of them are frightened, don’t know what to do and this can lead to social problems as they can’t cope.”

She maintained that the concept of “just chatting to a couple of bad pickni” needs to be changed and apart from the review of children in state care, made an appeal that the profile of child and adolescent mental health service be raised.