More than Nanny 911: Children's Week
Is Tip of Year-Round Iceberg

Although it might sound like a spin-off from television’s Nanny 911, National Children's Mental Health Week May 4-10 is also one of 52 weeks a year to help Northland children and their families.

So-called “reality television” may tell less than the whole story in other ways as well. TV often portrays children and families that appear more spoiled than ill. For Sherry Doyle and others at Tri-county Mental Health Services, the local children and their families who face serious mental illness need real solutions.

Doyle is Children and Youth Services Manager for Tri-County, which offers a rarely seen but intense range of help for thousands of Clay, Platte and Ray County residents. Among the most dramatic is an intense 90-day  service to help keep at-risk children in school, at home and out of jail or hospitals.

“If a child is at risk of being removed from the home or the school, we have a master’s level clinician that will come to the home and work with them to find solutions,” Doyle explained. “It’s a minimum of six hours a week and usually a lot more. They’re also on call 24-7. It’s an intense program.”

This at-home service is designed more than anything to head off what can be a long-term disaster: removing a child from school and other aspects of “normal life” because of ongoing behavioral problems. The work also recognizes that a child’s problems do not occur in a vacuum, and that long-term solutions should almost always include the family. “They work with the child that is having some issues, but they also work with the entire family as a whole,” Doyle said.

The symptoms involve relatively extreme cases of what may appear as just bad behavior. For children with mental illness, the behavior is uncontrollable. Some of these children get in trouble with the law or become dangerous to others, while others are dangerous only to themselves. In some instances, the family environment may be a part of the problem and the child may need to be placed with another relative or home setting. In the majority of cases, the family is not part of the cause but they are still affected.

“Usually, if something is that severe or involves those issue, then the whole family is affected,” Doyle explained. “That’s one of the reasons that instead of focusing totally on the child, we look at the child and everyone’s interaction with the child.”

Doyle noted that even those involved in the work often refer to the television show, Nanny 911. But where television portrays nannies solving problems in 60 minutes with little more than common sense, reality is more complex. Like well-meaning people who suggest that someone with clinical depression “just get over it,” these problems rarely respond to simple cures.

“The big difference is we deal with a lot of children who have serious mental illness,” Doyle explained. “That can make it more serious than for a Nanny 911.”

While the point person is the in-home counselor, Tri-County’s Youth Services actually works with community teams drawn from three area mental health specialists, Willowbrook Inc., Healthy Family Counseling and Support, and Crittenton Behavioral Health of Kansas City. The collaboration also involves local schools, county juvenile departments, the Children’s Division of Family Services and other organizations. The goal is to provide full “wrap around” services to help the child and the family.

“Basically, we pull in everything and develop a team to work for this child and see what we can do,” Doyle explained. “That may include a behavior plan at home and at school. It may include the child’s extended family. It’s whatever it takes.”

Although the cases can be large, Tri-County’s collaborative approach allows a lot of coverage. The program averages 184 children and families per week, a level that would be difficult for any single organization.

This team approach also allows individualized attention. Each group meets weekly to discuss their children and families, brainstorming to determine the best course of action. “Each child is different,” Doyle said. “Each family is different. But when we get everyone together, there are a lot of perspectives and we don’t follow a cookie-cutter formula. We work with each family and their strengths to make the child successful at school and at home.”

If all goes well, the intensive, 90-day program is followed by weekly or bi-weekly visits as needed. In most cases, the initial focus will be enough to keep children out of jail or hospitals and with their families. “The child will do best at home,” Doyle concluded. “That’s what we believe. Our goals is for the child to remain at home if possible.”