Residential Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children

The progressive past of residential treatment of emotionally disturbed children.

In January 1949, 9-year-old Betty stepped through the doors of the Cincinnati Child Guidance Home. For the next 2 years, the Home would attempt to treat her severe emotional and behavioral problems in an experimental approach called residential treatment. After 4 years of child welfare and child guidance interventions, the Home was a last resort. Betty’s home life was a mess. When she was 3, he...

Music Therapy With Emotionally Disturbed Children

Music therapy is defined as "the prescribed use of music by a qualified person to effect positive changes in the psychological, physical, cognitive, or social functioning of individuals with health or educational problems" (American Music Therapy Association, 2003). While music therapy is closely aligned with the behavioral sciences, it is distinct in that it bridges art with science. Two publi...

Power of child care worker and therapist figures and their effectiveness as models for emotionally disturbed children in residential treatment.

Residential Treatment and the Invention of the Emotionally Disturbed Child in Twentieth-Century America.

In the 1930s, children who were violent, depressed, psychotic, or suicidal would likely have been labeled delinquent and sent to a custodial training school for punitive treatment. But starting in the 1940s, a new group of institutions embarked on a new experiment to salvage and treat severely deviant children. In the process, psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers at these residentia...

Policing the emotionally disturbed.

In New YorkCity from 1971 to 1975, only 1.6 per cent of all police firearms discharges involved the class of people police have since come to call emo tionally disturbed persons (EDPs). Still, because po lice were comparatively unrestrained in those years, the number of such incidents was quite large: 46, or better than 9 per year.1 In theyears since then, police shootings have declined dramati...