Mental Health Issues Facing Youth Aging Out of Foster Care

Mental Health Issues Facing Youth Aging out of Foster Care
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Introduction
Children and youngsters living in foster care experience many psychological and other challenges to live healthy and emotionally stable; for the same reason, their score on measures of emotional and behavioral issues is much higher than normal children. Even though the prevalence of mental health issues in these children is common, the lack of information and research in this domain makes remedial measures extremely challenging. In most cases, children under foster care experience maltreatment and traumatic behavior from their foster parents; moreover, mental health services' availability to these children declines with the growing age. Hence, it is crucial to understand the underlying social, cultural, and psychological factors that cause a disproportionately higher rate of mental health issues in foster children. This literature, therefore, uses five scholarly research studies to evaluate various themes, such as description of the problem, usefulness of the research, evaluation of the methodology, and limitation of the research. Discussing these themes will help understand the causes and remedial measures for the higher rate of mental health disorders in foster children.
Description of the Problem
Several crucial studies have evaluated and made valuable descriptions of the growing problem of mental health issues in foster children; one of these studies uses a systemic literature review of 17 peer-reviewed articles to focus on various façade of the issue and outline a comprehensive description of the problem. For instance, it provides good estimates of the difference in the rate of occurrence of mental health issues in foster and regular children. Accordingly, it calculates that the rate of mental health issues in foster children is two to four times higher than in general children (Havlicek et al., 2013). According to the findings of this study, due to mental health issues, foster children lag behind other children in terms of their academic and social accomplishments (Havlicek et al., 2013). Hence, this problem deteriorates their social standing.
Understanding the negative impact of mental health issues on children aging out of foster care is a crucial aspect of the description of the problem. Therefore, this study informs that mental health issues impede these children's transition from foster care to adulthood, depriving them of the mental, physical, and emotional stability to cope with real-world challenges (Havlicek et al., 2013). Furthermore, this study identifies how mental health issues in foster children deprive them of suitable employment, as indicated by the higher proportion of unemployment in these transitioning adolescents (Havlicek et al., 2013). In this regard, another study identifies that former foster children experience homelessness, a higher rate of substance abuse, criminal activities, and arrests and calculates a considerable majority of foster children face mental health issues (Engler et al., 2022). These descriptions provide useful information about the negative fallouts of foster children's men...