Treating Washington kids with serious mental illness is a perennial problem: Long waitlists mean families often reach dead ends, and emergency rooms regularly house youth for days or weeks because there’s nowhere else for them to go.
Soon it will become even harder to find care. Pearl Youth Residence in Tacoma, one of the state’s four intensive residential programs for children, is set to close in November.
The closure translates to a massive loss in Washington’s ability to treat kids with diagnoses so significant they can’t live with their families: Pearl Youth is home to a quarter of the state’s long-term youth psychiatric beds…