* From last July…

For the 12th time since January, Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Director Marc Smith has been held in contempt of court.

Judge Patrick Murphy issued the contempt order following a motion from the Cook County Public Guardian’s office. This latest case involves a 15-year-old girl who has been stuck in a psychiatric hospital even though she was cleared to be released January 14, 2022.

And that practice of holding kids in psychiatric hospitals because there’s nowhere else to put them has consequences far beyond those particular children. It crowds out other kids in need.

* WBEZ’s Sarah Karp and Kristen Schorsch…

What’s unfolding at St. Bernard is happening across Illinois. For the most vulnerable kids who need immediate help, there are only around 30 hospitals in the entire state — making up about 15% of all hospitals — that have pediatric psychiatric beds. And not all take a large portion of Medicaid patients. Hospitals with the most psych beds for children are concentrated in the suburbs and near Chicago’s West Side, according to 2020 state data, the most recent year available.

Here’s the ripple effect: Children across Illinois are crisscrossing the state chasing the same beds, traveling perhaps hundreds of miles from their homes.

* Their story is about way more than the shortage of pediatric psychiatric hospital beds, however…

Twenty years ago Illinois developed a safety net for low-income children — like the 13-year-old in the oversized shirt — who are in mental health crisis and have Medicaid health insurance or none at all. The state works with more than two dozen nonprofits, including Ada S. McKinley Community Services, where Sadler works, to try to quickly assess and find help for these children after a call is made to a hotline. The program is called Screening, Assessment and Support Services, or SASS.

Illinois mental health providers call the program an essential lifeline, a godsend for families at a difficult moment. But a six-month investigation by WBEZ, involving dozens of interviews and a review of hundreds of documents and state records, finds the state is failing to ensure thousands of children are getting any follow-up help, let alone the type of intensive behavioral health support many need.

WBEZ found this vital safety net is riddled with holes. It’s buckling under the weight of a youth mental health crisis that is grappling with staff shortages and greater need. SASS workers can be a real help, but they are hamstrung — they don’t have enough places to send kids in distress.

As one provider put it, SASS is like a Cadillac driving nowhere. […]

Complaints that children in crisis are waiting hours just for a SASS assessment — a response is required within 90 minutes — are up 50% in the last year, even though state officials say they track this and hold SASS providers accountable. That’s according to WBEZ’s review of state records and data obtained through public records requests. Last year, about 46,000 SASS calls from across Illinois required a quick response.

And the state doesn’t even know if all children in crisis screened by a SASS worker were connected to mental health support, typically inpatient or outpatient care, let alone whether they actually received treatment. After months of asking, the state couldn’t provide screening outcome data for about 40% of the cases that required the 90-minute response over five years. More than 220,000 calls required a quick response during that time period, from 2018-22.

Go read the whole thing.