Iowa’s won a big grant to provide mental-health care for troubled children. Department of Human Services spokesman Roger Munns says this is an option for people who haven’t found success with any other treatment so far.
Munns says it’s really good news for parents of children who are way too aggressive at school and at home, who act inappropriately and sometimes react violently to even the slightest criticism — those kids who nothing seems to help. This six-year, 9-million-dollar grant from the federal government is aimed at strengthening services for those kids with serious emotional disturbances.
Currently there aren’t very many services for these children, and it frustrates parents to try and find the services that do exist. Right now, their symptoms just get worse until there needs to be intervention by police, courts or professionals who’ll remove the child from the home, and place them in a group home or to a psychiatric hospital, for months at a time. That’s costly, and Munns says studies have shown the results aren’t as good as they can get by surrounding a child and family with intense services there at home.
Munns says the home treatment options offered by this grant will also be used to help older teenagers who’ve been homeless or in foster-care situations transition to adulthood. He points out previously kids “aged out of the system” at age 18, and received few or no services after that. This grant will mainly be used to provide services in a 10-county area of northeast Iowa and it’ll be run by the University of Iowa’s Child Health Specialty Clinics.