Virginia’s Children’s Services Act

Virginia’s Children’s Services Act provides for services to children and youth who are in foster care or require foster care preventive services, who require placement in private schools to receive special education, who have behavioral and mental health challenges, or who have intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Crisis Link

CrisisLink offers free and confidential phone and text hotlines.

Beacon Tree

Beacon Tree is a Richmond-area foundation that is dedicated to being an advocate for the family, providing education and financial resources to help heal children struggling with mental health.

Northern Virginia Mobile Crisis Unit for Youth

The Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services (DBHDS) sponsors CR2, Children’s Regional Crisis Response program, 24-hour rapid response to youth (17 and younger) who are facing a mental health and/or substance use crisis.

Counselors provide phone screening and face-to-face assessment, intervention, and support.

The free service is also available by calling 844-627-4747.

Top Mental Health Challenges Facing College Students

Best Colleges offers an article on Top Mental Health Challenges Facing College Students

Mental Health Needs in Formed Families

For a PDF version of this fact sheet, click HERE.

MENTAL HEALTH NEEDS in FORMED FAMILIES

Virginia families formed by foster care, adoption and kinship care are much more likely than other families to need mental health care and supports.

The children and youth we care for are 3 to 4 times more likely to have behavioral and emotional disorders than children raised by birth families.

In addition, because of their mental health needs, our children and youth are at increased risk of facing inappropriate educational placements, inadequate specialized services and poor long-term outcomes.

• Students in foster care experience significant challenges with the lack of stability in their lives. Many have serious academic needs including learning gaps, poor attendance and serious emotional and behavioral problems. These problems faced by youth in foster care often go unnoticed, unassessed and unserved (Zetlin, Weinberg & Shea, 2010)
• Children who were involved with child protective services who were in out of home care are disproportionately more likely to be identified with an “emotional disorder” classification in school than students for whom there were no substantiated reports of maltreatment (Smithgall et al, 2004).
• The rate of school discipline incidents is higher for students in out-of-home care than for students with no substantiated maltreatment, and students with ED classifications had the highest rates of disciplinary incidents (Smithgall et al, 2005).
• US adolescents who had been adopted in infancy are more likely than nonadoptees to have teacher, parent, and child-reported mental health problems, particularly externalizing problems. Adoptees were more than twice as likely to have had contact with a mental health professional than nonadoptees (Keyes et al, 2008)
• 26% of adoptive parents report their adopted children age 6 and older were ever diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders (vs. 10% in birth families). (National Survey Adopted Parents, HHS, 2007)
• 38% of parents who adopted from domestic foster care report their children age 6 and up were ever diagnosed with ADHD (National Survey Adopted Parents, HHS, 2007)

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  Mental Health Needs in Formed Families Fact Sheet