More than 7.5 million children and adolescents in the United States suffer from serious mental health problems, yet only one-fifth receive treatment or services to alleviate their suffering and improve their conditions. To make matters worse, those who do succeed in penetrating the system often receive care that is inappropriate or overly severe.
In Stuck in Time, award-winning writer Lee Gutkind examines this major crisis in American health care - one that has been virtually ignored by the government, the media, and medical and public welfare professionals - by dramatically documenting the lives of three adolescents and the pain of a family that is desperate for help. Daniel and Terri have been warehoused in more than a dozen psychiatric institutions, transitional shelters, and group homes - without any discernible improvement in their psychological well-being. Meggan's parents were forced to relinquish custody of their daughter in order for her to receive essential mental health and educational services.
For three years, Gutkind immersed himself in the lives of these three teenagers and other children, as well as their parents, and experienced with them the labyrinth of mental health services. With them he navigated a system the chairman of the Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families of the U.S. House of Representatives has called "a national disgrace." Through countless hours of interviews in homes and institutions, he earned the trust of the families, doctors, and administrators whose lives and work are shaped by a system in which theories are plentiful but solutions are not.
In Stuck in Time, we meet those individuals whose progress and confidence are dashed by bureaucratic decisions to transfer them repeatedly among different institutions, the mothers and fathers who are blamed for poor parenting, and the government and welfare agents who must make policy decisions in a situation that so blatantly defies logic. Stuck in Time moves beyond the stigma of mental illness to convey the children's stories, frustrations, and fears and to offer a prescriptive challenge for the future.
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