YOUNG ADULTS AGING OUT OF FOSTER CARE WITH PTSD
Young Adults Aging Out of Foster Care With PTSD
One in four youth in foster care will have posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. There are about 26,000 youths who age out of foster care each year. Out of this number, a majority of the youth will suffer from PTSD (Pecora, 2010; Sakai et al., 2014). The youth who age out of foster care are faced with the difficulty of transitioning to adulthood without social and emotional supports, which could complicate their mental health issues (Ai et al., 2013). While laws are mandating the youth should be allowed to continue receiving mental health services, less than half of former foster care youth are engaged in mental health services. The discontinuation of these services is due to costs and lack of insurance after they age out of foster care. The youth might also be dissatisfied with the services or feel the services they receive do not improve their well-being. Samuels and Pryce (2008) indicates youth aged 19-30 years have PTSD rates up twice as high as United States War Veterans. PTSD is often triggered by traumas the youth face when they were young especially if they faced emotional and physical abuse. Children who face these traumas will be placed in foster care by Child Protection Services (CPS), and some of the children might remain in foster care till they are 21 years old (Salazar, Keller, Gowen, & Courtney, 2013). Youth in foster care have high rates of trauma exposure approaching 90%. While a majority of youth in the general population will also have experienced some form of a traumatic event in their lives, those in foster care seem to have experienced far higher rates than normal youth. The childhood maltreatment and adverse experiences the youth faced took place during a key developmental phase of their life, which could have compromised the youth's emotional functioning and placed them at risk of adverse mental health consequences. Even after leaving foster care, Valdez, Bailey, Santuzzi, and Lilly (2014) notes one in four youth will still be coping with symptoms of PTSD. Youth in foster care will have a lifetime prevalence of PTSD. Therefore, there is a need to assess their access to mental health services and make recommendations towards ensuring they still receive the support they need to deal with their mental health issues.
Literature Review
Ai et al. (2013) posits child abuse will lead to a chronic inability of the brain to regulate emotions in adolescence and later in life. The National Comorbidity Survey (NCS) indicates children who were repeatedly molested are likely to have drug abuse, dysthymia, and childhood conduct disorder when they become adults. For foster youth aging out of foster care, they are still attempting to process the highly traumatic experiences they faced during childhood, and they lack the necessary emotional, financial, and social support that a typical youth would have when transitioning into adulthood (Pecora, 2010). Foster youth will experience negative outcomes and face considerable challenges as they attempt to secure opportunities and resources, they need to lead independent lives (Ai et al., 2013; Samuels & Pryce, 2008). Foster youth struggling with symptoms of PTSD will have increased depressive symptoms as they transition out of foster care. If the youth do not receive the mental health support, they need they will end up suffering in silence as they do not have the coping mechanism to manage their transition. As the youth transition, they are leaving a system that required their dependence into an abrupt expectation of independence (Pecora, 2010). Upon leaving foster care the...
Conclusion
With the increased number of youths who exit from foster care each year and most of the youth being diagnosed with PTSD, it is vital to ensure the youth are prepared for life outside foster care. The challenges the youth will face once they leave foster care have been noted to contribute towards them stopping mental health services or even their medication. However, with early intervention, the youth can be advised on how they can maneuver outside foster care and still access the services they need the most. The transition phase for the youth should comprise of knowledge and information the youth can use when they leave foser care to assist them to seek professional mental health services. The social worker should ensure the youth have all the information and encourage them to speak about their fears before they leave foster care. Speaking up will open up communication, and the youth can receive assistance or answers to the questions they might have. Follow-up should be encouraged to…
References
Ai, A. L., Foster, L. J. J., Pecora, P. J., Delaney, N., & Rodriguez, W. (2013). Reshaping child welfare’s response to trauma: Assessment, evidence-based intervention, and new research perspectives. Research on Social Work Practice, 23(6), 651-668.
CARE, C. O. F. (2012). Health care of youth aging out of foster care. Pediatrics, 130(6), 1170-1173.
Hutchison, E. D. (2014). Dimensions of Human Behavior: Person and Environment. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.
Lougheed, S. C. (2019). Strengths-based creative mindfulness-based group work with youth aging out of the child welfare system. Social Work with Groups, 42(4), 334-346.
Pecora, P. J. (2010). Why current and former recipients of foster care need high quality mental health services. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, 37(1-2), 185-190.
Piel, M. H., & Lacasse, J. R. (2017). Responsive engagement in mental health services for foster youth transitioning to adulthood. Journal of Family Social Work, 20(4), 340-356.
Sakai, C., Mackie, T. I., Shetgiri, R., Franzen, S., Partap, A., Flores, G., & Leslie, L. K. (2014). Mental health beliefs and barriers to accessing mental health services in youth aging out of foster care. Academic pediatrics, 14(6), 565-573.
Salazar, A. M., Keller, T. E., Gowen, L. K., & Courtney, M. E. (2013). Trauma exposure and PTSD among older adolescents in foster care. Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology, 48(4), 545-551.
Samuels, G. M., & Pryce, J. M. (2008). “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger”: Survivalist self-reliance as resilience and risk among young adults aging out of foster care. Children and Youth Services Review, 30(10), 1198-1210.
Valdez, C. E., Bailey, B. E., Santuzzi, A. M., & Lilly, M. M. (2014). Trajectories of depressive symptoms in foster youth transitioning into adulthood: The roles of emotion dysregulation and PTSD. Child maltreatment, 19(3-4), 209-218.
Foster care is a harsh reality for many children in our society. After reading Chapter 15, answer the following questions: How is the effectiveness of Foster Care often inhibited? At Coachella Valley California, three factors prohibit the effectiveness of foster care: communities, children, and families. Communities: the families of children placed in foster care live in an environment characterized by structural deficiencies and poverty, or basic needs believed to characterize stable communities. Often,
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The authors examined the outcomes of children who were kept with their siblings and those who were separated from their siblings and compared those with a stable arrangement from ones who were initially placed together and later separated. Partial support was found for the policy of keeping siblings together in foster care; the results suggest that the policy is positive for a unique subset of siblings, or those who
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