These Foster Kids Need Mental Health Care. New Mexico Is Putting Them in Homeless Shelters – By Ed Williams/Searchlight New Mexico, Joel Jacobs/ProPublica, Kitra Cahana/ProPublica (ProPublica) / Oct 7, 2022
Youth crisis shelters aren’t set up to deal with foster youth who need intensive mental health treatment. When teens try to harm themselves or others, staff resort to calling 911.
This story contains descriptions of mental illness and self-harm.
If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources: Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Searchlight New Mexico. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Hours after Jaidryon Platero attempted suicide, an employee of New Mexico’s child welfare agency visited the 16-year-old in the hospital to investigate whether he was a victim of child neglect.
Platero winced whenever he turned his head, a sharp jolt of pain emanating from the stab wounds he’d left in his neck during a mental breakdown.
The teen needed mental health care and was unsafe living on the streets, the state child welfare investigator concluded in a report. Platero’s mother, whom he had been living with, couldn’t be located. He was taken into foster care and transferred to a psychiatric hospital.
About a week later, doctors there deemed him stable enough to be discharged. Platero gathered his belongings — a bag holding a change of clothes, a pamphlet from the American Association of Suicidology and a prescription for an antipsychotic drug — and climbed into a silver van emblazoned with the New Mexico state seal.
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