The mission of the Sullivan Center Foundation is to fund and establish quality mental health services for children, adolescents and their families. The Foundation’s efforts are based on the philosophy that comprehensive mental health services for children must be available in the community and accessible to all children and families who need them. The Foundation will educate the community regarding the need to prioritize research and treatment in the area of childhood emotional, behavioral, neurodevelopmental, and social pathology. It will seek funding through fund raising events, donations, and grants for the purpose providing multidisciplinary study and state of the art treatment of these types of childhood disorders.

Economic and social trends have created a crisis in mental health service delivery systems. Over the last 15 years financial support for mental health services has declined consistently and dramatically. This is true of State, Federal, and County support, and of private insurance resources. Our society’s attempt to stop rising health care costs has had a profoundly negative effect on the availability of mental health care. Previously available programs for children and families have either deteriorated in quality or collapsed. A continuum of care for children with mental health needs no longer exists. Seriously disturbed children in need of residential and/or impatient care often do not get the treatment they need. Many must be sent far away from home, family and community to get services. Currently there are few resources, few programs, the absence of research, and an inadequate number of child specialists practicing and being trained. It is difficult if not impossible for many families to afford care that is available. This comes at a time when it is apparent to all that our children are in desperate need of services.

The Foundation seeks to create a community based and community supported mental health resource and delivery system. If the resources our children need are to be developed, then the communities in which they live must take responsibility, invest financially in their mental health, and develop available resources.

While the treatment of individual patients and families has always been a primary passion of mine, equally important has been my passion for assuring that child and adolescent patients have access to programs that meet their mental health needs. To that end, I have been equally active in providing services and developing, or encouraging the development of, child and adolescent mental health programs.

The notion of founding a community based Foundation for the Central Valley with the mission of building a comprehension mental health delivery system for children and adolescents, has grown from years of frustration trying to get children services they need. Even in the early 1980’s availability of programs were inadequate but there was a financially driven momentum during the early 1980’s towards developing programs. In 1986, I opened the first inpatient unit for pre-adolescent children in the Central Valley. Within two years there were three such programs in operation. Children’s mental health services, however, were about to be delivered a fatal blow with the onslaught of managed care. In between 1986 and 1991, all three of these programs had collapsed. A similar downsizing of services began to be seen across the board, and the end result today is that we do not have an integrated mental health delivery system for children or adolescents. Funding has dried up, and programs have closed.

In the late 1980s, I founded the Sullivan Center for Children. The Sullivan Center for Children was organized as a for profit corporation that exists on fee-for-service financing. It had been my hope that the Sullivan Center could grow into a system that would be able to provide a broader range of mental health care for children and adolescents in our community. However, the structure of such a corporation is limited by the paucity of financial resources now available for mental health care. It is limited in its ability to meet the larger goals of providing broad range services and making services available to all children who need them. It is my belief that we can no longer rely on sources of funding that were used over the last several decades to provide mental health services for children, and that if our community is going to have such a system, it is our community that will have to invest its resources in the development.

I incorporated the Foundation as a not-for-profit organization that has the mission to stimulate our community into caring for its own children and adolescents. Our community is deeply devoted to providing state-of-the-art medical care for all children and adolescents. With education and understanding, my hope is this community will be excited about the prospect of caring for our children’s emotional wellbeing with the same passion. It is my belief that at this time only a community based Foundation can accomplish our goals by facilitating the collaborative use of community resources on a proactive basis, and securing funds for programs through private and corporate donations, fund raising events and grants. This is not a novel idea and many communities have had this type of Foundation for years. The only way that our children and families will have such services available is if the members of our community value them and invest their own human and financial resources to develop them. Investing in the psychological health of the children of our community should be the highest priority, as the quality of life for all of us is deeply affected when we ignore the mental health needs of our children. It is not only the child and family afflicted with emotional disturbance who suffers, but it is all members of the community at large. As such, it is fitting that the community act to address these problems.


THE NEED

The need for a comprehensive mental health system for children in the San Joaquin Valley is enormous. There is currently no organized integrated system that provides a continuum of care for our children and adolescents. Many of the services that are necessary for continuity of mental health care are not even available in our community. Those that remain are poorly integrated.

Services for pre-adolescent children are especially lacking. There are no therapeutic day programs outside of the few classes provided by the county and school districts. We do not have any residential treatment in our community for pre-adolescent emotionally disturbed children, and the adolescent residential treatment that is available is inadequate to meet the need. Most distressing of all, there are no dedicated child or adolescent inpatient psychiatric units in our community. Our young children in need of hospital or residential care must be sent to Sacramento, San Jose, or Los Angeles only to be returned home to a community with no after care service. Even diagnostic and outpatient services are woefully unavailable and often inaccessible to children and families with inadequate financial resources.

Funding for mental health programs for children has been at the bottom of everyone’s priority for over a decade. State, county and school district resources have dried up, and if one goes by what has happened to mental health benefits through insurance plans, the insurance industry has decided that mental health care for children is all but unnecessary. Programs that were in existence have been decimated and nowhere does there appear to be resources or plans to build new ones. This is at a time when the complexities of our society create many challenges to growing up healthy, and at a time when all one need to do is look around or pick up a newspaper to know how much trouble our children are in. It is also at a time when the sciences of psychology, social work, neurology and medicine, psychiatry, and education have the technology and can work together in a multidisciplinary fashion to effectively intervene and treat mental health disorders as they manifest in childhood.

The initial programmatic goals of the foundation are as follows:

1. Secure start up costs of 300,000 to 400,000 dollars to establish an office headquarters, and hire essential staff including a coordinator of services, grant writers, publicist, fundraiser, and support staff. Start up costs will also be used to secure basic materials, equipment, and supplies.
2. Begin and educational campaign within the community to establish firm community ties and to raise awareness about children’s mental health needs and the mission of the foundation.
3. Develop a therapeutic day school for children in need of individualized learning integrated with therapeutic support. The school would grow to serve children from pre-school through high school.
4. Develop a program with Central Valley Regional Center to provide a program for young autistic children and young children at risk.
5. Develop a program with Fresno Family Court to provide services to parents and children embroiled in custody disputes.
   
6. Develop a program with Juvenile Court to assess young offenders for mental disorders and provide therapeutic intervention.

Long-term goals include:

1. Development of a primary prevention program.
2. Development of a multidisciplinary diagnostic unit.
3. Development of funding and resources for outpatient treatment for children in financial need.
4. Development of a system of residential treatment for preadolescent children.
5. Development of a Hospital Crisis Unit for suicidal, severely emotionally disturbed and out of control children.
6. Development of after school, weekend and respite care services.
7. Development of a psychiatric inpatient hospital unit for preadolescent children.
8. Develop a research program that will provide ongoing research in the area of childhood psychopathology and treatment.

We are currently in search of:

1. Funding - both private and public that will provide start up costs, and get the foundation off the ground.
2. Volunteers to begin an educational campaign within the community as to the mission and goals of the Foundation.
3. Funding for a therapeutic day school.