epcounty.com - Border Children

The Border Children's Mental Health Collaborative is a community-based system of care development effort for youth with serious emotional disturbances (SED) in El Paso County, Texas. The BCMHC represents an effort among all the community's state and local child serving agencies to stop the tragic and wasteful removal of our children and adolescents, who have SED, to residential treatment centers that are often 500 - 600 miles from their homes and community.

Funded by SAMSHA (Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), through a six- year grant, the BCMHC is a County supported organization created to operate an integrated system of care for all El Paso County youth with SED; to promote the system integration through a governance team who provides policy leadership and includes family and professional representatives of all the community's major child-serving systems as well as courts that oversee the child welfare, juvenile justice, and mental health systems. The team also promotes the use of the wraparound process with individual youth and family teams to provide case management services for all youth who are served by the BCMHC, regardless of referral or payment source.