Where did the wraparound programs go?

In my prior research I conducted, I found that wraparound programs were an effective means to reach troubled and distressed youth and was a positive alternative to more restrictive settings. The concept of wraparound was to connect the child and their fmaily to community resources and to 'wrap' services around them to help them navigate through challenges. Today, this has all changed. With managed care companies at the helm, profits come first, not children and their families. Psychiatric drugs are often pushed to remain part of the services. There is no focus on community building and positive resources, everything has succumbed for the most part to the bio-psychiatric establishment and to the interests of a number of elites profiting from the system. Reumbursement rates for those going into the field to seek to help children have not changed in years, and agencies providing wraparound are barely staying afloat, some closing, while the managed care companies rake in money (all coming from taxpayers). What we will soon find with current societal conditions and with this lack of providing real support to families, is a generation of children largely drugged, numb, and apathetic. We will find a rise in anti-social behaviors. The money that these managed care companies sought to cut to put into their pockets will now cost taxpayers far more as children's needs become more costly because they never received the support they really needed.

-Dan L. Edmunds, Ed.D.
www.humanepsychiatry.info