Amber is one of the faceless, voiceless children that are shuffled through the Juvenile Court System in search of appropriate treatment.
Although the voice in this article is mine, Amber gave me permission to tell her story, in the hope that her experience will show how urgently we need to provide appropriate care for our mentally ill children. I wish to thank Jayne Walker for her encouragement and her belief that this article deserves an audience, and for her tireless editorial efforts in my behalf.
She decided, and I agreed, that this is the one that should be published. Because she is committed to publicizing the plight of children like Amber, Rachel enrolled in my feature article writing class and learned how to apply her talent and training in writing fiction to reporting.
Walker, English Department. I have few photographs of Amber from the last four years. In all of them, she is backed up against a red brick wall clad in a prison uniform of royal blue T-shirt or sweatshirt, jeans, and white athletic shoes. Amber is an inmate in the California Youth Authority in Ventura. Her crime is being mentally ill, and she is there because, in the final analysis, there was nowhere else for her to go.
Four years ago, on a sweltering August afternoon, I committed my thirteen-year-old daughter Amber to Sunridge, an acute care mental health facility in Marysville, California. That day was the beginning of a long, heartbreaking journey to obtain long-term care for my seriously ill child. And they were only the beginning of my ongoing struggle to obtain proper treatment for her in a system that is designed to fail her. She was diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder, better known as manic-depressive illness, and borderline personality disorder.
