Blog: Adolescent Mental Health

On December 13th, President Obama signed into law the 21st Century Cures Act. This sweeping legislative initiative is likely to be the final piece of legislation Barack Obama signs, and it is anything but an afterthought. The act is not without its critics, but some of the provisions of the 21st Century Cures ACT, for example those that pave the way for cross agency coordination, promise to reverberate in positive ways in the treatment field by accelerating the impact of research and innovation and catalyzing more collaborative work across government agencies and professional fields.

For organizations like Reclaiming Futures whose mission includes efforts to bring systems together in the delivery of services to youth and families, this new set of laws is good news. In this month’s Reclaiming Futures Newsletter, we draw your attention to this important piece of legislation and to a new blog post by Reclaiming Futures’ Bridget Murphy that highlights some of the key moving parts and implications that this important piece of legislation has for us in the field of substance use and behavioral health treatment.

As many of you know, Reclaiming Futures was awarded a Conrad N. Hilton Foundation grant in September 2014. The purpose of this grant is to develop, pilot test, evaluate, and disseminate a new version of SBIRT for youth at risk for deeper involvement with the juvenile justice system. As a first step, Reclaiming Futures issued a request for proposals and awarded five sites to help us in the endeavor. The sites selected, through a competitive process, were:

• Chittenden County, Vermont
• King County, Washington
• Mecklenburg County, North Carolina
• Nassau County, New York
• Washington County, Oregon

We round up the latest news on youth justice reform and national public health.

• Compromise reached on "Second Chance" legislation; raising the age debate now closed.  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy argued to raise the age of youth in the state juvenile justice system, but the debate ended last weekend in a compromise with Democratic leadership on bail reform for non-violent, misdemeanor offenses.  [NBC Connecticut]

• White House deletes FDA's planned policy and rationale for restricting flavored e-cigarettes. After demonstrating the appeal of flavored products to youth and young adults, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) submitted a tobacco regulation on flavored e-cigarettes to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The FDA policy and rationale for the restrictions were deleted by the OMB; no comments on why at this time. [NBC News] 

It took decades and a mountain of research evidence showing that incarcerating adolescents does little to prevent recidivism before policymakers took notice and began supporting measures to reduce incarceration and invest in community-based alternatives that prioritize treatment and support for youth and their families. Increasingly, over the past 15 years, we have seen the field come together around the common goal of creating a system for justice-involved youth that is more therapeutic, less punitive, less reliant on detention and incarceration, and more thoroughly grounded in research evidence and best practice. The catalyst for this paradigm shift has been a series of significant strategic investments by federal agencies and by major foundations like Annie E. Casey with its Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, the MacArthur Foundation and its Models for Change, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJF) investment in Reclaiming Futures. These investments have all paid off in different ways to drive the field forward.

The National Program Office (NPO) is very pleased to announce Reclaiming Futures' new rural community collaborative site in NW Ohio. The NW Ohio Reclaiming Futures (NORF) Initiative is a collaboration between Defiance, Henry, and Williams Counties, as well as their regionally shared service providers and community stakeholders. As a new example of a Reclaiming Futures rural community collaborative site (the site model also exists in Kentucky and North Carolina), NW Ohio provides an important example of a site tapping into an innovative state justice reinvestment fund in order to join the Reclaiming Futures initiative.

NW Ohio is Reclaiming Futures' fifth site in the state of Ohio. Evan Elkin, Executive Director of Reclaiming Futures, credits the growing presence of Reclaiming Futures in Ohio to the neighborly and supportive tendencies of Ohioans, which creates a grassroots sharing of information. “They share with their communities and around the state - and word of the positive outcomes the existing sites are seeing is getting around,” explains Elkin.

Defiance, Henry, and Williams Counties of NW Ohio provide an excellent example of Ohio's collaborative and supportive nature, and how this quality of working together and sharing resources particularly benefits rural communities. The three counties joined together to propose the NORF Initiative upon recognizing a need in their communities for more consistency and specifically...

Every week Reclaiming Futures rounds up the latest news on juvenile justice reform, adolescent substance use treatment, and teen mental health. 

• Casey’s JDAI Releases LGBTQ Practice Standards at Annual Conference (Juvenile Justice Information Exchange)
  During the annual Juvenile Detention Alternative Initiative (JDAI), the Annie E. Casey released it's practice guide for working with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender youth.

Every week Reclaiming Futures rounds up the latest news on juvenile justice reform, adolescent substance use treatment, and teen mental health. 

New ‘Ban the Box’ Bill Would Improve Access to Federal Jobs for Youth With Records (Juvenile Justice Information Exchange)
The new Fair Chance To Compete for Jobs Act would help youth with criminal histories gain employment by prohibiting employers from asking about criminal history until a conditional offer of employment is received. The hope is that this will help qualified candidates avoid the stigma of past conviction when seeking out employment. As many as 70 million people with criminal histories may face barriers to employment.

Kids and teens are gearing up to head back to school, but more than 12 million of them will face a mental health disorder over the next year. Sometimes these issues aren’t addressed in schools or by parents, and can result in substance use, status offenses and ultimately, involvement with the juvenile justice system.

As juvenile justice and behavioral health experts, we can empower our networks to provide support to young people struggling with a mental health disorders, so they can continue on a productive path inside and outside the classroom.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) is gearing up for its 26th year hosting Recovery Month, a national observance to promote awareness around substance use treatment and mental health services.

As a champion for better treatment for adolescents, Reclaiming Futures echoes SAMHSA’s Recovery Month message that behavioral health is essential to overall health. We’ve seen tremendous gains across our 42 sites among teens who have received substance use treatment or mental health services, connected with mentors and natural helpers, and immersed back into their communities in productive ways.