Mateo Jaime knows what it's like to be institutionalized in a psychiatric facility for no good reason. He said as a teen he ran away from an abusive foster placement and police brought him to a youth psychiatric hospital where a doctor checked him in.
"I explained my situation," Jaime said. "'I was brought here because things weren't working out with my foster home,' and he told me 'This happens all the time. I guarantee you'll be out of here within two weeks.'"
But Jaime didn't get out after two weeks. It was two months, he said, before he was released and returned to the same foster placement. He said he never had a court hearing and didn't understand what was going on with his case.
That time did not pass quickly. Jaime said seeing the ways staff treated kids inside was haunting, including watching staff use aggressive restraints and sedative injections on kids.
"Growing up in a home where all you see is domestic violence, and then seeing it at this facility where you have no rights, no due process, no hearing-" Jaime said. "Nobody's coming to check in on you. You're alone and just thinking, 'If I do one thing that's wrong, that could happen to me.'"
Jaime testified multiple times during the last two legislative sessions in favor of a bill that would protect kids like him. It would require that kids have a court hearing within seven days of a psychiatric placement to figure out whether the placement is necessary. That's much sooner than the current requirement of 30 days. Kids would also be appointed their own lawyer, something experts said typically happens in practice but would be required if the law passes. The bill passed unanimously in both the state House and Senate and is awaiting the governor's signature.
Amanda Metivier, who helped draft the bill and heads Facing Foster Care, which advocates for youth in state custody, said the legislation is long overdue.
"It's been a longstanding issue that acute psychiatric hospitals have been used as a placement for children and youth in foster care," she said.
Federal investigations have documented abusive practices inside psychiatric hospitals for kids in Alaska. The state has also admitted that they've used psychiatric hospitals to house foster children when there aren't available placements.
And Metivier said it's gotten worse.
"In recent years, as we've seen a steady decline of the number of foster homes, we've seen more youth who are lingering out in hospital settings when they don't meet the criteria to be in those places," she said.
She said she's heard from foster youth for several decades about the abuses that happen inside some of these hospitals. If this becomes law, it will require a judge to hear from all interested parties to figure out the best kind of placement for each child.
State Rep. Andrew Gray, an Anchorage Democrat, who introduced the bill last session, said letting kids linger in psychiatric institutions just isn't right.
"The absolute human rights violation of having your freedoms completely taken away and no one coming to help you, that alone is enough that we have to fix it," he said.
And those placements are expensive too, he said. They cost more than $1,000 a night, partly paid by the state.
"We want to make sure that the child is in the least restrictive environment that's appropriate," Gray said.
To that end, the bill also creates a state license for what are called “treatment foster homes,” which serve foster youth with complex needs. That could increase capacity for the state to offer less restrictive settings than mental health hospitals.
Mateo Jaime said he still wakes up sometimes and thinks he's inside the psychiatric institution.
"Nowadays it's hard for me to maintain any kind of friendship, any kind of acquaintance, because I just feel like I can't trust people," he said.
He said he's learning to gain back the trust he lost in adults back then, and he hopes to prevent foster youth from going through the same thing.
