Hundreds of Illinois Children Languish in Psychiatric Hospitals After They’re Cleared For Release

This ProPublica story was eye-opening in highlighting Illinois' inability to move children out of psychiatric hospitals when the state should, causing hundreds of children to for weeks and even months too long in isolating environments. The infographic placed within the middle of the story is very specific, using coloring to display how many children on each day between July 2015-December 2017 were being held past release dates. On the worst day(s), 41 children were held beyond medical necessity. The infographic allows the reader to track any patterns occurring over time. You can also see that while 2017 fared better than 2015 and 2016, October and November 2017 still involved a shocking number of overstays. I appreciate this data visualization because its specificity allows the reader to drawn her own conclusions, depending on how she digs into the numbers.

This infographic provides context for an article that already provides devastating statistics on how children are affected when they spend so much time in facilities. Psychiatric facilities are meant for short term stays—kids are supposed to be released quickly to a different type of program that allows for more educational instruction, more typical day-to-day activities, and less waiting. And these releases are supposed to happen on time. Letting kids languish in isolating facilities is detrimental to their social and emotional health and development. The graphic underscores the failure of the Illinois system to get kids where they need to be, when they need to be there. 

"On average, more than one in five days spent in a psychiatric hospital, the records indicated, were not medically necessary,' Duaa Eldeib writes. Distilled into a sentence, that statistic is a lot to take in. In an infographic, it's even more overwhelming for the reader, sharpening my sense that the system needs reform.