Youth in Foster Care and Psychotropic Medications

Making Healthy Choices: A Guide on Psychotropic Medications for Youth in Foster Care looks like a graphic novel, but its photo-heavy format and cartoon speech balloons carry a serious message. Designed to appeal to youth, the booklet walks the reader through the decisions that have to be made when mental health problems—short- or long-term—need to be addressed. Often, the quick solution to dealing with behavior issues of youth in foster care has been to prescribe psychotropic medications. Recent publicity about the high numbers of medicated children and youth ...

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Improving the Legal Representation of Children

In October 2009, the U.S. Children’s Bureau named University of Michigan Law School the National Quality Improvement Center on the Representation of Children in the Child Welfare System (QIC-ChildRep). The QIC-ChildRep, is a five-year, $5 million dollar project to gather, develop and communicate knowledge on child representation, promote consensus on the role of the child’s legal representative, and provide one of the first empirically-based analyses of how legal representation for the child might best be delivered. The Center, which is run by the legendary ...

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Legal Immunity for CPS Workers who Lie?

The critics and plaintiffs’ attorneys are out there. They seethe with frustration in their assertion that there are child protection workers who are as dysfunctional and flawed as some of the abusive and neglectful parents they investigate. They feel mistreated, ambushed, without recourse to a neutral oversight authority, and fume that the courts will believe the word of child protection workers over their clients. And yet, when there is a credible allegation that a child protection worker has knowingly made misleading or false statements which resulted in the ...

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