Mentally ill children stuck in hospital limbo (Boston Globe)

Parents and advocates report that in recent weeks across the state, at least a dozen children and teens in crisis - threatening violence to themselves or others - have waited three, five, even seven days in hospital emergency rooms or medical wards for psychiatric beds.
Kelly Rowell, left, diagnosed with developmental disabilities and bipolar disorder, waited for a week in a hospital emergency room. By all accounts, the state has made significant progress toward solving the problem of "stuck kids" - children with mental illness deemed well enough to leave hospital psychiatric units but stuck in them for lack of treatment programs outside.
But while it has gotten easier for children to leave the state's mental health facilities, which should make more beds available, it appears to have gotten harder, in some cases, to get in.

A Debunking on Teenagers and 'Technical Virginity'

Contrary to widespread belief, teenagers do not appear to commonly engage in oral sex as a way to preserve their virginity, according to the first study to examine the question nationally.
The analysis of a federal survey of more than 2,200 males and females aged 15 to 19, released yesterday, found that more than half reported having had oral sex. But those who described themselves as virgins were far less likely to say they had tried it than those who had had intercourse.
"There's a popular perception that teens are engaging in serial oral sex as a strategy to avoid vaginal intercourse," said Rachel Jones of the Guttmacher Institute, a private, nonprofit research organization based in New York, who helped do the study. "Our research suggests that's a misperception."
Instead, the study found that teens tend to become sexually active in many ways at about the same time. For example, although only one in four teenage virgins had engaged in oral sex, within six months after their first intercourse more than four out of five adolescents reported having oral sex.

Out from the shadow of teen suicide

It was fall 2005. Three Needham students had already committed suicide, and there would soon be a fourth. And as Haas, just 16, flirted with suicidal thoughts of his own, his parents, Chris and Ronnie Haas, were busy planning Michael's college education, not seeing signs of his deepening depression. It is the classic parent-child disconnect, mental health specialists said yesterday at a State House forum about teenage depression. Specialists say that depression often goes unnoticed by parents, which can lead to more serious problems, like the suicides in Needham or more recently Nantucket, where three teenagers - ages 15, 16, and 17 - have killed themselves in the last 11 months. The problem with teenage depression, specialists said yesterday, is that many people do not want to or do not know how to talk about it and often retreat into silence for fear of what others might think or say.

Study Debunks Theory On Teen Sex, Delinquency

Researchers at Ohio State University garnered little attention in February when they found that youngsters who lose their virginity earlier than their peers are more likely to become juvenile delinquents. So obvious and well established was the contribution of early sex to later delinquency that the idea was already part of the required curriculum for federal "abstinence only" programs.
There was just one problem: It is probably not true. Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.