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Health in young persons’ establishments: treating the damaged and preventing harm
Author(s) -
BAILEY SUSAN
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
criminal behaviour and mental health
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.63
H-Index - 54
eISSN - 1471-2857
pISSN - 0957-9664
DOI - 10.1002/cbm.1993.3.4.349
Subject(s) - harm , acknowledgement , accommodation , population , institution , psychology , mental health , public relations , medicine , social psychology , psychiatry , political science , sociology , environmental health , social science , computer security , neuroscience , computer science
In the UK, physical institutions for children and other young people, such as residential schools, hospitals or prisons, have become as unpopular in concept as such institutions for adults. By 1990 only about 13 000 young people were so institutionalised, compared with 60 000 in 1970. Two consequent themes have emerged, however, which are familiar to those working with adults. The first is that the population still in residential accommodation, secure or otherwise, shows a much higher level of psychiatric disorder and gross neurological and behavioural disturbance than such a population 20 years ago, and secondly that inadequate provision is made — either in an immediately practical or in a research sense — for those not getting access to the physical institutions. This paper criticises a national tendency to provide simplistic reactive solutions to each new problem as it arises, and emphasises the importance of recapturing an overview of the range, extent and development of problem careers and of attending to the complexity of individual need rather than over‐commitment to philosophical and theoretical management models — or even dogma. It is increasingly apparent that as part of the acknowledgement of individual variance, and offering full potential for change, specialist child and adolescent health service input is important. A tendency to deny the extent of health, including mental health, problems among young people in favour of family and social explanations for deviancy has led to the dearth of trained specialists. This must be addressed quickly if ‘the community’ is not to become a mere extension of failing institutions, and the physical institutions themselves sumps for youngsters with the most intractable problems, where those problems are only compounded. The surge of recent deaths of young people in custody is just one indication of the current failing not only of the institutions themselves, but of the total system of which those institutions are a part.