Giving Compass' Take:

• ProPublica investigated the number of cases in which young children are being unnecessarily hospitalized because the state can not find a place for them to live, having detrimental effects on their growth and development. 

• How can philanthropists and organizations help the state to find proper housing for these children or better living conditions than a hospital?  Can they collaborate with foster care centers or schools to provide better accommodations? 

• Read about Seattle Children's Hospital mental health initiatives targeted to young kids,  taking preventative measures to help children earlier on so that hospitalizations won't be necessary in the future. 

In the spring of 2016, a 12-year-old named Gabriel Brasfield spent three and a half months in a psychiatric hospital in Chicago. His hair, which he liked to wear cropped, grew long and unkempt. He forgot what it felt like to wear shoes because he was allowed to wear only hospital socks. He missed months of school, and couldn’t go outside. He celebrated his 13th birthday at the hospital, where he said the walls were bare and there was little to do.

And for eight weeks of those three and a half months, he didn’t even need to be there. Doctors had agreed Brasfield was ready to be discharged about six weeks after he arrived, but the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), which is his legal guardian, couldn’t find anywhere for him to go.

As I found during a four-month investigation for ProPublica Illinois, Brasfield is one of hundreds of children in the care of DCFS who are held each year inside psychiatric hospitals for weeks or months, even though they have been cleared to leave.

These unnecessary hospitalizations are another failure for a state system that has frequently fallen short in its charge to care for Illinois’s most vulnerable children, who suffer from conditions such as severe depression or bipolar disorder.

Though statistics to compare how states handle children in psychiatric hospitals are scarce, and other states also experience similar challenges, psychiatrists and mental-health experts say circumstances in Illinois are among the most dire in the nation.

Mitchell Glaser, a doctor who has worked with hundreds of children through DCFS in his 20 years as a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Chicago, said the unnecessary hospitalizations leave children impulsive and angry. “It’s a waste of those kids’ lives,” he said.

Read the full article about child hospitalizations by Duaa Eldeib and ProPublica Illinois at The Atlantic