CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) RESOURCE CENTER Read More
Add To Favorites

Protecting our children: A public health crisis

Daily Item - 4/10/2017

April 10--Health officials around Pennsylvania are sounding the alarm on child protection.

Pat Bruno, director of the Geisinger Janet Weis Children's Hospital Child Advocacy Center in Sunbury said the public needs to understand how adverse childhood experiences affect adults later in life.

"What we need now is a movement," Bruno said. "We need to make people aware that we're dealing with a public health crisis."

Researchers of the Adverse Childhood Experience Study found traumatic childhood experiences can lead decades later to physical and mental health problems.

"We know the more adverse childhood experiences you have, the more likely in the long term you'll have physical problems, behavioral problems, psychological problems as an adult," Bruno said. "We know your life expectancy will be decreased by as many as 20 years."

The solution is to start screening children and families early and provide counseling and therapy, he said.

Across the commonwealth, efforts are underway to be part of the solution.

In Crawford County, Audrey Smith, executive director of the Meadville-based Parkside Psychological Associates, has been at the forefront of efforts to make the city a "trauma-informed community."

Smith and her colleagues have trained 5,300 people in the past four years to be more aware of trauma and its effects, recognize traumatized individuals and get them help. There are currently 1,500 trained trauma specialists working in local school districts.

"They can recognize what trauma looks like in kids," Smith said, "and they can make good referrals and also respond better to it.

"We work with the family to look at all the possibilities that are available to them," she said. "What makes this agency important and great for the community is the staff, their combined work experience, ethics, and commitment to protecting children. If that means helping a family clean their home, they go out and clean the home with the parents. Whatever it takes literally to keep that family intact and the children safe."

Union County also employs a trauma counselor, a position that Children and Youth Services (CYS) Administrator Matthew Ernst said has evolved over the years as Stacey Crusie worked with at-risk children.

"She quickly realized that everyone she's dealing with has unresolved trauma," said Ernst. "The children we know, because we know the issues they have. We discovered the parents when they were children or adults, they also suffered a lot of trauma and that really wasn't being addressed."

With approval from the commissioners, Crusie received a year's worth of training to become certified and now provides counseling services.

"If we can stabilize the parent, then we can stabilize the environment," said Cruise, a 20-year employee. "The more stable with mental health, the better we can stabilize the home, the work. It's very obvious that the struggle with kids is because the parent is struggling. The referral comes in for kids, but it might be the family is unhealthy."

Crusie uses a technique called Progressive Counting. Developed by psychologist Ricky Greenwald, the psychotherapy procedure is used for resolving trauma or loss memories via memory reconsolidation. Briefly, it entails guiding the client to imagine a movie of the distressing memory, from beginning to end, while the therapist counts aloud first from 1-10, then 1-20, then 1-30, etc., to a maximum of 100. As the distress level goes down, the movies get shorter. This continues until no memory-related distress remains.

"You're shifting the trauma from one part of the brain to another, to the long time memory where they're not easily triggered," Crusie said.

The program is volunteer-only and has been successful with participants, she said.

The challenge, however, is that up to 70 percent of children referred to mental health services never step in the door for one reason or another, said Smith.

Preventing children from falling victim to an abusive parent or caregiver is an ongoing hurdle, but child advocates say there are multiple programs to aid struggling families -- including parenting classes offered at the Day Reporting Center in Lewisburg, Safety Net Counseling Inc. in Mount Carmel and Community Action Agencies across the state.

Access to these programs in rural areas is often hindered by the lack of public transportation, Snyder County CYS Administrator Rose Weir said.

Melodie Culp, executive director of the Montour County Children and Youth, said the agency is working to find in-home service providers to deliver consistent care to families.

"Difficulties arise when the services can't meet the families where they are, specifically in their homes or reasonably local," said Culp. "Transportation is an ongoing issue for families. We do what we can to facilitate in these issues. We call, complete follow-up visits, utilize service providers, speak with school and community members -- whomever that family haw identified as important in that child's life."

Another safety net for at-risk kids is the Nurse Family Partnership offered in Northumberland, Montour and Columbia counties. Started in 1999, the program partners registered nurses with low-income women who are expecting their first child and monitors them until the child's second birthday.

"The nurse becomes a mentor, a friend, a confidant," Bruno said. "It's been shown to follow dramatically decrease the incidents of child abuse in a high-risk family, and tremendously increase the chances the mom is going to finish her education."

In Ashtubula, Ohio, local advocacy groups have formed to combat drug abuse, but few are geared specifically toward intervention in the lives of children with addicted parents.

Lake Area Recovery Center (LARC) and the Community Counseling Center provide a number of activities that have prevention as their goal.

Community Counseling Center Director Joleen Sundquist said her organization provides both behavioral and addiction treatment services and outpatient behavioral health services for children.

"We have a number of services available to children and their families," she said. "We recognize that in addition to a multitude of concerns, our young people are facing (parental substance abuse) at increasingly alarming rates."

"We recognize that the stressors our community is facing are not isolated," added Sundquist. "We value collaboration with the variety of organizations available to assist in supporting our youth and families."

Individual or group therapy counseling is available to assist children in coping with mental and emotional disorders as well as situational stressors, like family, peer related and school related stressors.

Community Support, or CPST, provides individual and/or group support for children needing additional support in the community and is usually focused on stressors that impact the child's functioning. Psychiatric services are also available. An Adolescent Recovery Group for children ages 13 to 17 is available for those in need of substance abuse group therapy level of care. Also available is Trauma Informed Care, which recognizes that individual trauma results from an event or series of events or set of circumstances experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual's functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional or spiritual well-being.

Struggling parents and caregivers are also encouraged to reach out to CYS for help before an official intervention.

"Everyone here wants to help families. We're very focused on developing a relationship with the community" said Northumberland County CYS Administrator Katrina Gownley.

Child care workers like Gabriel in Mercer County want to educate the public about CYS and what it has to offer families to keep them safe and intact.

Mercer County CYS Administrator Kathryn Gabriel said educating the public about the agency and what it has to offer families to keep them safe and together is key in making that endeavor a success.

"The only way we can keep kids safe is to bring awareness to child abuse and protection and request people to make a report if they suspect child abuse and neglect," she said. "When people lose confidence in the system, it's the kids who suffer."

Email comments to mmoore@dailyitem.com. Follow Marcia on Twitter @marciamoore4. Justin Strawser of The Daily Item, Joe Pinchot of The (Sharon, Pa.) Herald, Mark Todd and Dave Deluca of The (Ashtabula, Ohio) Star Beacon and Lorri Drumm, Mike Crowley and Keith Gushard of The Meadville (Pa.) Tribune contributed to this report.

___

(c)2017 The Daily Item (Sunbury, Pa.)

Visit The Daily Item (Sunbury, Pa.) at www.dailyitem.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.