When the staff at North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center noticed a trend of first–generation Latina teens coming to the center with depression, anxiety and even suicidal thoughts, they came up with a program that has been an enormous success: The Latina Girls Project, which uses not only individual, group and family therapy, but also organizes monthly outings, supported by a generous grant from the John and Janet Kornreich Charitable Foundation, to show the girls the world outside of their communities and provide them with hope for their future.
Many of the outings are designed to expose the girls to their heritage and to celebrate Hispanic culture. On one recent trip, the girls attended a performance by Segunda Quimbamba, a Jersey City-based percussion and dance ensemble that performs authentic bomba and plena, the drum music of Puerto Rico. The music was uplifting and joyful, and the girls were instantly drawn to the rhythmic expressions of the group, which features drums, wind instruments, guitarists, vocalists and dancers performing Latino songs. The musicians provided the girls with some interesting and important historical information—but the most important and impactful part of the experience was when the performers invited the teens to dance and drum. To watch as some of the most shy and withdrawn girls bravely and excitedly joined the group onstage was inspiring beyond words. The trip revealed how music and dance are terrific therapeutic tools which help teens heal by encouraging self-expression and self-awareness, and it also exposed the teens to positive messages about Hispanic culture, making them feel the richness of their heritage.
For another cultural event, the guidance center staff took 18 teens to see a play called La Gringa at the Repertorio Español in Manhattan. For most of the girls, it was their first exposure to a Manhattan theater. The play was an excellent choice for this age group due to their ability to identify with the protagonist. La Gringa depicts the struggles of a young Latina woman whose parents are Puerto Rican but who is born and raised in New York City. She visits her parents’ homeland as a young adult who is seeking out her cultural identity. She immediately falls in love with her country of origin, but is met with the reality that she is neither a “native” Puerto Rican nor a North “Americana,” as family members label her. The play uses humor and sensitivity to deal with the cultural conflicts related to the different values and their impact on relationships within their families. The girls especially enjoyed how the protagonist is able to assert herself and seek out her individualism.
A group from the Latina Girls Project at the Statue of Liberty in summer 2014.
Another trip this year was a spectacular evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to celebrate Women’s History Month. The teens, who were invited by the Met’s Multicultural Audience Development Initiative’s Advisory Committee, had never experienced such an elegant affair and the guidance center staff members who chaperoned the trip were so proud of the girls’ ability to conduct themselves with grace and maturity as they interacted with accomplished women of diverse social, racial and educational backgrounds. The teens confidently introduced themselves as young women from Long Island looking to expand their opportunities in their future careers. It impressed the girls so much that a few of them are saying that they’re now looking into college, their next milestone in life.
On Aug. 18, Rosie O’Donnell took to social media to ask her followers to help her find her 17-year-old daughter Chelsea, who had run away from home the week before. O’Donnell posted an alert on her website and Twitter account stating that Chelsea hadn’t been seen since Aug. 11.
O’Donnell also posted that her daughter had stopped taking her medication and “was in need of medical attention.” Her spokesperson added that “Chelsea, like millions of people, lives with mental illness. It has been a difficult road for Chelsea and her family and they just want her back safe.”
Thankfully, Chelsea was found unharmed. Apparently, alerts from her peers and the pinging on her cell phone led police to her location. O’Donnell tweeted her thanks, telling her followers, “Chelsea has been found and is safe in police custody—thank u all for the help and light #missingchildren.”
While no one outside of O’Donnell’s family knows the circumstances that led Chelsea to run away, one possible cause is clear. A quick search on social media revealed that there is no shortage of gossip about Chelsea’s family life, sarcasm about O’Donnell’s fitness as a mother, black humor suggesting she was kidnapped by Donald Trump and speculation about the missing girl’s mental status. There were also shaming commentaries as to how her mother’s impending divorce may have contributed to her daughter’s distress.
It’s more than likely that Chelsea O’Donnell had easy access to all of this. One can only imagine how a young person in turmoil was able to make sense out of it, and how much of the onslaught of cyberbullying against her family contributed to her demoralization before she made the dangerous choice to head to the home of a stranger, a 25-year-old who had a history of criminal offenses whom Chelsea met on an online dating app called Tinder.
All media—conventional and social—can be invaluable in helping to track down a missing child; that is a blessing. Almost anything in the way of messaging that might lead to the recovery of a runaway child is welcome.
But where’s the dividing line between offering assistance and adding to the emotional damage? What is the benefit in publicly revealing, among a population (that’s us, folks) that remains primitive in their understanding and acceptance of mental illness, that the runaway child has a history of mental health problems? While there should be no shame in having a mental illness, any more than with any other illness like diabetes, we still live in a culture that stigmatizes those who face these challenges. This story, and the subsequent cyberattacks joking about the condition, make that more clear than ever before.
Traditional media in recent decades has skewed more and more in the direction of sensationalism. It’s not unheard of for certain media outlets to use expressions such as “crazy” or “loony” to refer to those with mental illness; and social media, a 24-7 town meeting with minimal monitoring, is a runaway train that assumes more of the characteristics of chaos than order. The very tools we now have at our disposal that can be instrumental in the recovery of a missing child can also administer damage that the public ignores in the celebratory aftermath of the child’s recovery.
In the O’Donnell case, it seems likely that the family made a decision to discuss Chelsea’s mental health issues to help find their child, and one cannot imagine a more compelling reason to “go public” with her condition. But it’s also likely that, given the ignorance that is so widespread regarding mental illness, it wasn’t an easy decision for them to make.
If this incident sheds some light and sparks some intelligent discussions about media sensationalism, the role of social media both for good and ill, and the stigma surrounding mental illness, then that will at least result in some positive outcomes from what has been a sad, personal family story made public.
Helping others is always in fashion, and that’s why Entrée Boutique in Port Washington is hosting a special shopping weekend to benefit The Children’s Center at Nassau County Family Court, a program of North Shore Child & Family Guidance Center.
The kick-off event will be on Thursday, October 8 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. with wine and light refreshments at Entrée Boutique, located at 11 Main Street in Port Washington, one of Long Island’s most charming Gold Coast villages. Weekend shopping hours are Friday and Saturday, October 9 and 10 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Sunday, October 11 from noon to 5 p.m.
The Children’s Center provides a safe and enriching environment for children ages 6 months to 12 years on-site at the Nassau County Family Court while parents are involved in court business.
About Entrée Boutique:
Entrée Boutique is a go-to shopping destination filled with the most current young designers and must-have accessories, all thoughtfully curated with the chic, modern woman in mind. Noted in Long Island Newsday as having the best customer service, Entrée’s owners are committed to staying ahead of the fashion curve and providing an individualized shopping experience.
Have you ever sought mental health care for your child? What about care for a drug addiction? Have you made calls to multiple providers on your health insurer’s “list” and had the door slammed repeatedly in your face? Or were you fortunate enough to make a good connection and then unceremoniously have the rug pulled out from under you, with your insurer denying continued care?
Welcome to the club.
If you have a child with a mental health or addiction problem, you know how hard it is to make that first phone call. A parent with a child with cancer doesn’t hesitate to call for help. But when mental health is the problem, it can take weeks, months or even years because of the crippling effect of stigma. But what about the two situations I described above: You make that call, but you are denied continued care or you’re denied access to care in the first place?
The federal parity law, formerly known as the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, is designed to prevent group health plans and health insurance companies from imposing less favorable benefits than they do for other medical conditions. The law is supposed to guarantee that people with mental illnesses have the same access to treatment as patients with diseases like diabetes, but some insurers have continued to limit treatment in subtle ways.
According to a recent report by NPR, since 2010, the United States Department of Labor, which is the main federal agency in charge of parity, has found 140 instances in which a patient’s parity rights were violated. Although all those issues were resolved voluntarily, no insurer has been fined and none of the results are public.
Regarding gaining access to care in the first place, network adequacy refers to a health plan’s ability to deliver the benefits promised by providing reasonable access to a sufficient number of in-network primary care and specialty physicians, as well as all health care services included under the terms of the contract. The reality is that, because private insurers pay substandard rates as compared to Medicaid, middle class families are finding it harder and harder to find providers to help their children. They look at their insurer’s list of providers, make phone calls and are repeatedly told, I’m sorry, I don’t accept your insurance. The lists are inadequate, outdated or just plain falsehoods.
On July 22, 2015, Assemblyman Todd Kaminsky authored a letter to the New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) to express deep concern about the lack of commercial insurance coverage for mental health services for middle class families on Long Island. He requested that DFS launch an investigation to determine the scope of this pressing problem.
Assemblyman Kaminsky said, “After hearing from numerous constituents and closely studying this issue, it is clear that commercial insurance companies do not have adequate mental health service networks for hard-working families. This lack of access to care is alarming, and I hope DFS will immediately respond by commencing a thorough study of this issue.”
While Medicaid covers comprehensive mental and behavioral health services, commercial insurance frequently does not provide coverage, or if they do, the rates are miniscule compared with the cost of treatment. The reality today is that fewer community-based mental health clinics are accepting privately insured clients who earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, which leaves these families with nowhere to turn for affordable care. They have few options to access care for their children, even those experiencing life-threatening crisis situations.
By ignoring the enforcement of the federal parity law, the majority of representatives in government are turning their backs on the millions of Americans who are in need of essential mental health care services. We cannot trust insurance companies, whose eye is on their bottom lines, to do the right thing. It’s no exaggeration to say that lives have been and will continue to be lost unless we pressure our politicians to make this a top priority.
