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Erin Descoteaux is a mother of three and a nursing student with two decades of experience in healthcare and early childhood education.
My daughter is almost 11 years old. She is bright, creative, funny, and she has ADHD. Like many kids with ADHD, she has struggled in school. It hasn’t been for lack of trying. She works hard, and we’ve done everything we can to support her: counseling, occupational therapy, medication management with her pediatrician.
Still, we need more. Specifically, we need a comprehensive psychological evaluation to better understand her needs and get her the right educational and clinical support.
We’ve been on a waitlist for that evaluation for almost a year. Let me repeat that: a year.
As a mother, the wait has been heartbreaking. As someone who has worked in healthcare and early childhood education for over two decades, and is now studying to become a nurse, it’s deeply frustrating. I know how systems should work. I’ve worked in them. And yet, I still find myself lost trying to navigate the very system that’s supposed to support my child.
The evaluation costs $1,400. My husband and I are fortunate enough to be able to pay for it. But what about the many families in Maine who can’t? What about those who rely on MaineCare and now face even more limited access following recent cuts at Edmund Erving Pediatric Center, one of the few places serving publicly insured kids?
At the same time that families like mine are stuck on waitlists or scraping together funds for private assessments, the state of Maine is spending over $31 million a year to send just 70 children to out-of-state psychiatric residential treatment facilities. That’s nearly half a million dollars per child spent not on early intervention or community-based care, but on high-cost, often far-away placements that are the result of a system that fails to support kids early and consistently.
The logic doesn’t hold up — not as a parent, not as a future nurse, and not as a taxpayer.
We are underfunding the front end of the system and overpaying for its consequences. Every dollar we fail to spend on early evaluation, therapy, school support and family guidance increases the likelihood that a child will eventually need far more intensive and expensive intervention.
This is not just bad policy. It’s a moral failing. We are asking kids to wait months and years for help while we burn through resources on crisis care. We are telling families that unless their child is in crisis, they need to wait and then penalizing them when the crisis inevitably comes.
We can do better.
We need to invest in local, community-based mental health services that are accessible to all children, regardless of income or insurance status. We need to properly fund centers like Edmund Erving, not cut them. We need to value early assessment and treatment as the prevention tools, they are not luxuries reserved for the privileged.
My daughter is one of many. Her story is not unique, but it is urgent. For her sake, and for the sake of thousands of kids like her, Maine needs to realign its mental health priorities. We need to build a system that works before children are in crisis.
Because every child deserves a fair chance to thrive.
