Beyond the big story: There’s not enough mental health care for WV’s teen girls

According to 2023 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly three in five teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. That’s twice as many as that of teen boys. (Getty Images)

You know this story. A girl was found dead on a bathroom floor in an “emaciated to a skeletal state.” Family members were charged with child neglect causing death. A government system continues to stonewall the media from getting answers. The governor says he is open to a special session to reexamine homeschooling policies to shore up holes in the safety net, so no other kids fall through. 

But for a moment, forget this story and remember the girl. 

Kyneddi Miller was 14 years old. From what we’ve learned from the criminal complaint, family members believed that she suffered for years from an eating disorder. They detailed “clear and distinct physical problems” that left her unable to physically function on her own for almost a week before her death. 

Family members said she had only been outside two times in four years and had not been to school since 2020. 

According to information provided by Gov. Jim Justice’s Chief of Staff, state troopers visited Kyneddi’s home in 2023 because a distant relative had called and expressed concern that she had not been seen in public for quite some time. Kyneddi told one of the troopers that she was afraid of COVID-19 and didn’t want to be around others. 

While the past few months have been filled with ugly facts about child maltreatment and our state’s broken child welfare system, there’s this quiet story about a broken girl struggling with mental illness. 

And the question remains that even if her mother had sought the health care she needed, would she have gotten it? 

Across the country, there’s a mental health crisis among adolescent females. According to 2023 CDC data, nearly three in five teen girls felt persistently sad or hopeless in 2021. That’s twice as many as that of teen boys.

Across the country, emergency room visits for teenage girls spiked during the pandemic, rising 22% in the pandemic’s second year, while teen boys’ visits declined.

According to researchers, the rise was associated with an increase in suicidal and self-harming behavior and with eating disorders.

Here at home, during the second year of the pandemic, more than 3,000 kids went to West Virginia University Medicine’s emergency rooms for mental health care. In 2019, the number was a little more than 2,000. That’s a 62% increase in kids seeking emergency mental health care at the WVU Medicine hospitals, with the network adding eight emergency rooms in that time period. 

As any health care provider will tell you, most emergency rooms are no place for a kid in a mental health crisis. No West Virginia ER provides adolescent mental health care. They hold the kids in limbo for hours, days and even weeks until either a mental health care facility can take them, which could be hours away from home, or the parents give up and take them home, which often results in a call to child protective services.  

This lack of community mental health services has plagued our state for the past decade. Nine years ago, the U.S. Department of Justice investigated the system and reported their findings to then-Governor Tomblin in a letter that said, in part: 

“We conclude that West Virginia fails to provide services to children with significant mental health conditions in the most integrated settings appropriate to their needs in violation of the [Americans with Disabilities Act]. The State has needlessly segregated thousands of children far from family and other people important in their lives.  With adequate services, the State could successfully treat these children in their homes and communities. The systemic failure to develop critical in-home and community-based mental health services also places children with mental health conditions who currently live in the community at risk of unnecessary institutionalization.”

This lack of community-based mental health services is why hundreds of West Virginia’s foster care kids wind up in out-of-state care or psychiatric hospitals — because the state doesn’t know where to put them.

I know quite a bit about this problem because I watched it all unfold. Ten years ago, I helped draft and advocate for legislation to create a state strategic plan to improve our state’s adolescent mental health care. The bill stalled in Senate Finance because the state Department of Health and Human Resources saddled the bill with a $50,000 fiscal note to pay for one of their employees to oversee the work.  

The Senate Finance Committee chair refused to put the bill on the agenda because of the fiscal note. 

I’ve thought a lot about that bill lately, and where we could be now as a state, addressing the health care crisis that took Kyneddi’s life, if the legislature had only prioritized child health enough to commit $50,000 to improve it. 

As this story continues to unfold, with reporters searching for answers and as state leadership looks for some sort of resolution to put this all to rest, we can’t forget that at the heart of this big story is a little girl who needed mental health care and didn’t get it. Now is the time to make our failing mental health care system, and its tangled relationship with the child welfare and foster care systems, a legislative priority. It’s time to do the hard work and invest the resources.

The post Beyond the big story: There’s not enough mental health care for WV’s teen girls appeared first on West Virginia Watch.