No, it’s not ‘irresponsible’ to remove youth from troubled Lakeshore Hospital

David Fletcher-Janzen of Lakeshore Hospital correctly notes (“Lakeshore Hospital serving children well despite state cuts in mental health funding,” Nov. 21) that the state of Illinois has grossly underfunded psychological services for Illinois children. As a result, children under Department of Children and Family Services care too often are held in psychiatric hospitals longer than necessary (a condition known as “Beyond Medical Necessity”) or, tragically, shunted into the state juvenile justice system.

Fletcher-Janzen, however, offers the wrong prescription for these problems: that DCFS youth should still be treated at Lakeshore, a facility where nearly 20 alleged instances of patient-on-patient or staff-on-patient abuse have been reported to DCFS just since January of this year. Fletcher-Janzen has suggested that DCFS found all of those allegations baseless, but that simply is not true.

No DCFS youth should be left in a facility where there are significant signs that youth may be unsafe. That is why it was not remotely “irresponsible,” as Fletcher-Janzen claims, for the ACLU to have demanded the prompt and orderly discharge of all DCFS youth at Lakeshore, with youth who already had completed treatment leaving first, followed by removal of remaining youth as soon as medically appropriate. The ACLU has emphasized at all times that no youth still needing treatment should be transitioned unless and until transfer to another setting is clinically appropriate and in the youth’s best interests.

Lakeshore claims it has taken any needed steps to ensure that its patients are safe. But DCFS cannot approve new admissions there without an independent assessment of the hospital. In the meantime, rather than focusing only on Lakeshore, Illinois should be asking why DCFS’ current acting director has so adamantly resisted the ACLU’s calls for that independent review and for DCFS’ development of more and better services for youth in their care.