Test Prep #3

The Bay Citizen

Mental Health Center for Youth Is Closing

By Trey Bundy

Published: April 19, 2012

   A center for mental health treatment in Sanfrancisco is being closed down. 14 teenagers that have come from traumatic backgrounds are being transferred to other places.  The children are so messed up that other programs have refused them, only that center accepting them. I find this very unfair, for the city to close down the only place that they could go to. I disagree with the city closing down the center and using that money for other programs.
  
  The most common diagnosis is post-traumatic stress disorder. They are the children with the highest level of any young person in the system. These teenagers come from abusive and neglected backgrounds. They are so scarred that they are even aggressive toward grown-ups and even other kids. The center was the city's only safe residential program these type of teenagers. It is unfair to send them away to other places where they are not accepted, to send them away where they cannot receive the enough attention they need.
  
   By the time the youth reaches the age of 13, they have already been in 10 or 12 different centers. The center uses $15,000 a month to maintain each client. But the city has come to a agreement to use the remaining money for other programs that serve at-risk youth. Over the last 5 years, there has been an increase in the number of teenagers who are psychotic or have schizophrenic. This is bad because many of the youth are going to go back to their communities, where there is a bigger chance of them being sent to the juvenile justice system, while others are going to other programs that don't offer everything they need.

    This is unfair. It is like sending a child who is autistic and needs to be sent to a different location to recieve different educational requirments to a public school who barely has any programs. It is like taking a animal that needs to be in the ocean and putting it in a lagoon. Some of the things that it needs are there, but not all. What will become of the teenagers? Will they go back to their old ways, or will they become worse?