ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Inequality Among Youth Mental Clinics

The result of more good work by the Orange County Grand Jury was this week’s withering report that better treatment is provided for whites than for minority youths needing mental health services. At least Health Care Agency Director Tom Uram deserves praise for candor. He said one reason for the problem is that Anglo parents can afford lawyers and are more skilled at pressing their demands. That’s a sad state of affairs.

The County Health Care Agency has 14 clinics that treat school-age children suffering from mental health problems. Half the clinics are in wealthier, more white, South County. Times reporters who toured the facilities found one in San Juan Capistrano, in an elementary school, to be a cheerful place filled with plants, teddy bears and pictures. In Anaheim, however, the clinic is in a cinder-block building with long corridors and dirty walls. Many youngsters are in special-education classes, so having a center at a school makes sense; it costs time and money to transport a child elsewhere for help.

To its credit, the county has moved in recent years to improve the disparity between the different regions of the county. It has put clinics in schools in the Orange Unified, Santa Ana Unified and Ocean View school districts, for instance. But money is a problem, as it is at every level of government. The county’s budget for health care keeps getting trimmed. School districts fight for funds and may not give high priority to setting up a mental health clinic for youngsters on a campus. But these are children who need and deserve special attention, as the federal government noted in ordering schools to “seek and find” such students.

The slow pace of bureaucracy does not help, either. County officials say they have been searching for a replacement for the Anaheim clinic for up to two years. Putting a clinic at a school in west county has taken more than two years. One way to improve things would be to follow the South County model, which was spearheaded by the head of the county-operated youth clinics there, who has reached out successfully to volunteers. All the furniture at the San Juan Capistrano clinic was donated by people in the community.

The grand jury rightly asked whether enough was being done to help minorities by overcoming language problems. Workers who can adapt the good parts of the South County program to other districts and explain them in Spanish or Vietnamese are needed. The county must do more to find them.

County officials are right to say the problem is complex, and they have admitted providing different levels of service depending on the citizen’s ethnic background. Now they must eliminate those differences.