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Contact: Gail Donovan
Donovan Communications
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MENTAL HEALTH EXPERTS SPEAK AT CONFERENCE
ON THE NEEDS OF FOSTER CHILDREN

BROOKLYN, NY—October 29, 2002— Social workers, foster parents, therapists and other caring adults understand foster care from the perspective of an adult, but their point of view often differs drastically from that of a foster child, according to a mental health expert who grew up in foster homes.

Francine Cournos shared her point of view at “Losses and Resilience: Working with Foster Children in Psychotherapy,” the third annual mental health conference sponsored by Brooklyn Psychiatric Centers. More than 100 social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, case managers, guidance counselors, and other professionals attended the event, which was held on October 25, 2002.

Dr. Cournos is the author of “City of One,” a memoir of her life growing up after relatives placed her and her sister in foster care following the death of her mother when she was 11. Her father died when she was 3 years old.

Reading excerpts from her book, Dr. Cournos recalled the rage she felt when her aunts and uncles took her to Manhattan to meet a woman who told her that she and her sister were being placed in foster care. “I said I’d jump off the Empire State Building,” she said, but the adults only humored her.

Rather than prepare the girls for the separation, Dr. Cournos said the family left it to the caseworker to explain what was happening, which made it appear that the relatives would take the girls back if they could. But that wasn’t the case. The family just wasn’t taking responsibility for their decision to place the girls in foster care.

“I saw myself being sold into slavery,” Dr. Cournos said. “I was depleted and exhausted, unable to make sense of this final separation from my family, beyond understanding how all the adults I was counting on could band together to exclude me. It was too painful to
think about how their lives would go on without Alexis and me, go on as if we never existed.”

She said being put in foster care was more difficult than experiencing the death of both her parents. After her mother died, she had reconstructed her world with her relatives, but after being placed in foster care everything was gone—her apartment, her school, her classmates.

Within two weeks of her placement, Dr. Cournos’ foster mother began insisting that she call her mother, but the more the foster mother came after her, the more she retreated.

“Foster placements go wrong because foster parents aren’t used to getting rejected,” Dr. Cournos said. “People in foster care reject things. It’s adaptive. When things are being done that you have no control over, refusing is the only way to maintain some autonomy.”

Dr. Cournos said that foster care operates on the theory of the body not the mind. It focuses on abuse and neglect and the physical well-being of the child, but doesn’t take into consideration what is happening emotionally.

Dr. Cournos, a professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, is director of the Washington Heights Community Service, a comprehensive program for the severely mentally ill headquartered at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She has worked in the area of HIV/AIDS and mental illness since 1983, and has participated in numerous research projects, training grants, practice guidelines, and policy development projects. She has edited two books, and written numerous articles and book chapters on the interface of HIV/AIDS and mental health issues with a particular focus on people with severe mental illness. Dr. Cournos has spoken and published about disclosure, permanency planning, and childhood bereavement in the AIDS epidemic. She is currently chair of the American Psychiatric Association Committee on AIDS.

The second speaker at the conference, Dr. Elizabeth Kandall, spoke about launching the Children’s Psychotherapy Project, New York, which provides individual, weekly, long-term psychological treatment to a number of foster children on a pro bono basis. The key to the program, which was launched in February 2001, is that one therapist works with one child for as long as it takes and doesn’t end the relationship at the end of a training year or when the child’s placement, foster care agency, or social worker changes.

Dr. Kandall said she started the program in New York after seeing that children, who enter foster care and have already suffered profound loss and often years of abuse and neglect, had many therapists during their years in treatment. If children in foster care receive psychological treatment, with few exceptions, the children will see students and interns who are required to leave after one year, she said.

Dr. Kandall recalled that as an intern receiving training she was a 7-year-old girl’s third therapist. “She thought it was the norm to be left,” she said of the child. “These  children needed a relationship. I offered one but at the same time I was planning to leave.”
Dr. Kandall, a founding member and clinical director of the Children’s Psychotherapy Project in New York, is also on the board of directors of A Home Within, a nonprofit organization helping foster children build lasting relationships in the absence of a stable home and family. She has a private practice in Manhattan.

Joanne Siegal, CSW, a clinic administrator at Brooklyn Psychiatric Centers’ Bushwick Mental Health Center, also presented at the conference and discussed the problem of children having multiple therapists. She said therapists often don’t know that a child has changed placements until the child fails to show up for an appointment because the foster care agencies for many reasons don’t keep therapists informed.

Ms. Siegal said she has observed that children in foster care often fear that they did something wrong that caused them to be removed from their homes, and children may fear they contributed to the removal by telling teachers they were being hit.

Another speaker, Ilona Sena, CSW, a clinic administrator at Brooklyn Psychiatric Centers’ Louis E. Reinhold Downtown Mental Health Center, told conference participants that children idolize their parents even when they are abusive and neglectful. She also said during the child’s treatment, it is essential to engage the foster parents and emphasize how important they are to the success of the treatment.

Brooklyn Psychiatric Centers provides borough-wide mental health services to Brooklyn’s most vulnerable residents through its clinics in Bushwick, Canarsie, Flastbush-Sheepshead Bay, Williamsburg-Greenpoint, and downtown Brooklyn and the borough’s public schools. Its diverse staff of more than 100 professionals provide more than 60,000 visits annually to adults, seniors, children and their families. For more information, see www.bpcinc.org.