Mental health programs aim to help students break cycles of trauma and violence
20th February 2012 · 0 Comments
By Zoe Sullivan
The Louisiana Weekly
It’s no secret that New Orleans residents were traumatized during and after Hurricane Katrina. Some mental health professionals feel, however, that this trauma may be a contributing factor to the violence the city is currently experiencing. Dr. Milton Anderson, a child psychiatrist at Ochsner Medical Center, told The Louisiana Weekly that gun violence operates like an “infectious disease,” and so dealing with the issue means addressing the root causes.
Anderson has been working with five Recovery School District charter schools for the last few years, piloting a mental health program aimed at supporting children and their families and breaking the cycle of violence and trauma. The program is called “Mental Health Plan for Schools (MHPS),” and it is a collaboration between the Ochsner Clinic Foundation, the state Department of Education (DOE) and the University of New Orleans (UNO).
On Wednesday morning, Anderson was at McDonogh 15 in the French Quarter for a meeting with parents, school staff, and other outside professionals. As children in the elementary school moved quietly between their classrooms and the library, Anderson remained cloistered with others in a small conference room. Over the course of the day, Anderson said he worked with 10 different children and their families. But, he pointed out, this number only represents a fraction of the 60 families he and his colleagues are supporting. According to a report that Anderson submitted to the DOE last fall, he personally worked with 152 students, but he says that he was conservative with the numbers he submitted so this figure is actually higher.
As he describes it, the MHPS efforts are an attempt to “invent” solutions. Unfortunately however, Dr. Anderson estimates that it will be another six years before he and his team have the results they need from the program to accurately determine which kinds of interventions succeed and which do not. This obviously leaves the majority of New Orleans’ youth relying on other sources of support.
Within the Orleans Parish School Board, Mary Smith runs Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary in Holly Grove. Unlike the RSD schools, which have full-time social workers on staff at each school, Smith must attend to her students’ needs with just the help of a part-time social worker. Although there were resources in the immediate aftermath of Katrina to deal with problems, Smith says that much of that has now dried up.
“There’s a percentage of kids that school can provide for,” Smith said, speaking about responding to children’s mental health needs, “but there are kids that are going to need additional mental health, and as it comes to social skills and modifying behavior, they may need some reinforcement outside of school.”
Further putting such efforts at risk, however, are budget cuts being handed down by Governor Jindal to the state’s public health system. According to testimony during the city council’s criminal justice committee meeting, the state is facing a $500 million shortfall because federal matching dollars that usually supplement the state’s healthcare budget did not arrive this year. Instead of distributing the pain of this gap, however, the state has chosen to maintain Medicaid reimbursement rates for private providers while slashing $34 million from the Louisiana State University hospital system. Of this, $15 million will disappear from New Orleans’ Interim LSU hospital resulting in 110 fewer employers and dozens fewer patient beds.
The Governor’s Office declined to comment on this issue for The Louisiana Weekly. The Department of Health and Hospitals responded to questions with a criticism of LSU’s pattern of relying on federal dollars to round out its budget.
In an email to The Louisiana Weekly, a DHH spokesperson wrote: “For many years, LSU has not taken the necessary steps to bring their budget in line with their appropriated amount…The cuts they are making now are not related to the budget shortfall, but are necessary to bring their budget in line with their appropriated budget for [fiscal year] 2012.”
The same email also contested the notion that 80 percent of the state’s Medicaid patients receive care through the public hospital system, arguing that “most Medicaid recipients receive care in private doctor’s offices and hospitals, which have all been subject to several rounds of rate reductions over the last several years.” The statement did not respond to The Louisiana Weekly’s question concerning why almost half of the cuts to the LSU system are being shouldered by the New Orleans Interim LSU hospital.
Debra Morton, Director of Behavioral Health Services for the RSD, told The Louisiana Weekly that children’s behavior tends to reflect what they experience in the home. She acknowledged that substance abuse and domestic violence spiked after the storm, but these issues haven’t gone away.
“Child abuse along with domestic violence is still very prevalent. I would say that, on the average, 2 or 3 times a week we are referring to child protection.” Morton’s statistics say that over 5,000 students received social work services during the 2010-2011 school year, and that 1,712 participated in more intensive mental health services. This year, the latter figure is already at 2,038.
Morton underscored that the upcoming state budget cuts would have a serious impact on children and their families since RSD schools often refer to community-based services, which will be losing funds.
“When you have a nation that is acknowledging New Orleans and what has happened to New Orleans,” Morton told The Louisiana Weekly, “but then you have a state that has made that decision to remove funding away from the more severely impacted area of the state. I don’t understand that reasoning.”
This article originally published in the February 20, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
