Professional Resources
- APA: Protecting Children – APA released its first-ever resolution on physical discipline by parents, laying out the research showing that spanking and other forms of corporal punishment are ineffective and potentially dangerous. The resolution recommends that parents seek out other forms of discipline to shape their children’s behavior.
- APA: Solitary Confinement of Juvenile Offenders – Solitary confinement is a practice in which an individual is isolated in a cell, usually for disciplinary purposes. Every year, thousands of prisoners under the age of 18 are placed in solitary confinement. Juvenile solitary confinement is associated with serious consequences for mental and physical health, and APA supports efforts to eliminate the practice.
- ASTART – Recommended Reading and Links about Residential Programs for Teens – Concerns about protecting youth in residential care
- ASTART – Use Caution When Considering “Struggling Teen” Schools – Many therapeutic boarding schools for teens have a troubled history of being neither therapeutic nor places where youths receive an adequate education. Unfortunately, some, if not most, of these facilities are places of harsh and ineffective “therapy” for young people who have had trouble with family relationships, school performance, acting out sexually, drug or alcohol use, or who have been in trouble with the law.
- ASTART For Teens – The Alliance for the Safe, Therapeutic, and Appropriate use of Residential Treatment (ASTART) is a community of professionals, family members, and survivors working to protect children from abuse and neglect in residential programs, and ensure families have safe and effective community-based care.
- ASTART for Teens: Facts and Warning Signs – Learn to protect your child by reviewing the warning signs of abusive residential programs for teens.
- ASTART Mental Health and Family Resource Links – A summary of links to finding help in your area, and helping resources available online.
- Better Options for Troubled Teens – Psychologists are creating and implementing programs that curb problem behaviors among juvenile offenders.
- FTC – Evaluating Private Residential Treatment Programs for Troubled Teens – FTC Urges Caution When Considering ‘Boot Camps’
- Mental Health America: Residential Treatment for Children and Adolescents – MHA believes that it is essential to avoid out-of-home placement whenever wrap-around care could meet the child’s or youth’s and family’s needs. For people with access to high-quality, local, community-based, non-profit residential facilities, and a comprehensive system of care, residential treatment may result in a relatively quick transition back to the community. Transitioning back is much harder for parents who enroll their child in a private, for-profit, often distant facility that may prove unresponsive and even abusive. The private for-profit residential care industry has grown very fast, without yet incorporating the ethos of the public sector alternatives that it is replacing, is impervious to community pressures, and is resistant to transparency and family collaboration.
- Mental Health America: Seclusion and Restraints – Seclusion and restraints have no therapeutic value, cause human suffering, and frequently result in severe emotional and physical harm, and even death. Therefore, as a matter of fundamental policy, Mental Health America (MHA) urges abolition of the use of seclusion and mechanical restraints and prohibition of the use of sedatives and other medications as chemical restraints and elimination of the use of physical restraints except for very brief periods and only when necessary to prevent imminent physical harm.
- NASMHPD’s Position Statement on Seclusion and Restraint – The members of the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD) believe that seclusion and restraint, including “chemical restraints,” are safety interventions of last resort and are not treatment interventions. Violence-free and coercion-free mental health treatment environments can be accomplished using the Six Core Strategies to Reduce the Use of Seclusion and Restraint Planning Tool developed by National Technical Assistance Center (NTAC). Seclusion and restraint should never be used for the purposes of discipline, coercion, or staff convenience, or as a replacement for adequate levels of staff or active treatment.
- Restraint and Seclusion – The Bazelon Center opposes the use of seclusion and restraint in all but the most extreme instances where there are serious and immediate threats to physical safety and health. They should be used only in settings that are prepared to address the inherent physical and psychological risks involved.
- Solitary confinement facts – Solitary confinement of prisoners goes by a number of names—isolation, SHU (special housing units), administrative segregation, supermax prisons, the hole, MCU (management control units), CMU (communications management units), STGMU (security threat group management units), voluntary or involuntary protective custody, special needs units, or permanent lockdown.
- Stop Hurting Kids: Promoting Alternatives to the Use of Seclusion and Restraint – The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has developed in collaboration with partners at the Federal, State, and local level, consumers, and national advocacy organizations, a series of issue briefs on the use of seclusion and restraint.
- Systems of Care: A Framework for System Reform in Children’s Mental Health – The purpose of this issue brief is to re-examine system reform in children’s mental health, clarify what the system of care concept is, and explore the continued relevance of the system of care concept and philosophy as a framework for reform.