What is the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services Program for Children and Their Families?

This program promotes more effective ways to organize, coordinate, and deliver mental health services and supports for children, adolescents and their families. In many communities, services for young people with serious emotional disturbances are unavailable, unaffordable, or inappropriate. An estimated two-thirds of the young people who need mental health services in the United States are not getting them. As a result, many children and adolescents with mental health issues become involved with the juvenile justice system and sometimes parents must give up custody of their children in order to obtain services. There can be long waiting lists for services, and when children and their families do receive help, several different providers, with different treatment plans, may be involved. The Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services Program for Children and Their Families strives to improve the delivery of mental health services to children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbances and their families. This program ties together children's mental health programs into a single plan with the family leading a "team" that is known as a "system of care."

What are the goals of the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services Program for Children and Their Families?

The Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services Program for Children and Their Families provides grants for the improvement and expansion of systems of care to meet the needs to the estimated nationwide 4.5-6.3 million children with serious emotional disturbances and their families. States, communities, Territories, Indian tribes, and tribal organizations are eligible for the grant program, which was first authorized in 1992. Since that year, the program has funded 85 grantees across the country; there are currently 54 grant communities and 31 former grant programs.

The program promotes the development of service delivery systems through an approach based upon a four-element philosophy:

* Mental health service systems should be driven by the needs and preferences of the child and family, and address these needs through a strength-based approach;
* The focus and management of services should occur within a multi-agency collaborative environment and be grounded in a strong community base;
* The services offered, the agencies participating, and the programs generated should be responsive to the cultural context and characteristics of the populations served;
* Families should be partners in the planning, implementing and evaluating of the system of care.

What does the Comprehensive Community Mental Health Services Program for Children and Their Families do?

The Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), administers 6-year Federal grants to implement, enhance, and evaluate local systems of care. The Child, Adolescent and Family Branch of CMHS manages the program and receives and evaluates the competitive grant applications. Applicants must show substantial planning support from States, localities, family members and local service systems. Grantees are required to match Federal dollars with local and State monies and to develop sources for non-federal matching contributions. Communities will be incrementally responsible for funding a greater portion of the expenses of the program over the life of the grant. This prepares grant communities for the cost of sustaining the systems of care when Federal support for the grant program ends.

Communities are given flexibility in how they organize their systems-of-care approach to meet the needs of their children and families. However, each of these grant-funded programs must include families as partners in designing the system of service delivery. An individualized care team of family members and service providers can focus on the strengths of the children and their families in order to determine the types of services that are appropriate. The goal is to provide families with services that are both affordable and available, when, and where they are necessary.

These grants support a broad array of services designed to meet the multiple and changing needs of children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbances and their families. They coordinate systems of care by developing partnerships with mental health, child welfare, education, juvenile justice, and other local, public and private agencies. Each project provides services that are underdeveloped or nonexistent in most communities, such as intensive family-based services, respite care, day treatment, clinic- and school-based services, crisis outreach services, therapeutic case management, therapeutic foster care, and diagnostic and evaluation services.

© 2003