Connecticut’s Solnit Psychiatric Money Pit: The DCF Mental Institution Beast Wants More Money
Republished with permission from AbleChild.
AbleChild Site Visit to CT DCF Mental Institution two year ago VIDEO
On July 21, 2026, Department of Children and Families (DCF) employees stood on the lawn of the Albert J. Solnit Children’s Center in Middletown asking Connecticut lawmakers for at least $20 million in new taxpayer funding, along with another $3 million every year to improve the facility.
As officials pleaded for more money, the condition of the state-owned psychiatric campus told a different story. Looking across the deteriorating property, taxpayers should be asking one simple question: Where has all mental health and behavioral health money gone?
Looking back over the past fourteen years, AbleChild has consistently investigated, testified, submitted recommendations, filed public inquiries, and exposed the psychiatric drugging of children in Connecticut’s state care, including sharing Medicaid psychiatric prescribing data patterns with behavioral health oversight committee members. Throughout that time, AbleChild has repeatedly urged state officials to replace a failed institutional psychiatric model with approaches that emphasize education, life skills, family and community support, and accountability. Today, despite AbleChild’s warnings and repeated calls for reform, the state has ignored the call for human rights and is once again asking taxpayers for millions more.
A state that routinely inspects private properties should first explain whether one of its own psychiatric facilities has been held to the same standards it expects of everyone else. If millions of taxpayer dollars have already been invested in the Solnit Center, why does the property appear to be in such a state of decline?
Before lawmakers approve another appropriation, they should ask an even more important question: Why should taxpayers invest another $23 million in a system that AbleChild warned was failing fourteen years ago?
AbleChild first raised that warning in 2012 after touring the children’s psychiatric unit at Riverview Hospital. What our nonprofit witnessed was deeply disturbing. Children were confined in locked rooms with curtains covering the windows, hidden from public view. The conditions reflected an institutional model built on isolation, confinement, and psychiatric intervention rather than providing the kind of care Connecticut’s most vulnerable children deserved.
Following that inspection, AbleChild testified before the Connecticut General Assembly, urging lawmakers to shut down the children’s psychiatric program instead of continuing to pour taxpayer dollars into a failing system. AbleChild also provided ABC News’ Diane Sawyer with information concerning the psychiatric drugging of children in Connecticut’s care, helping bring national attention to practices that had received far too little public scrutiny.
Connecticut’s response was to ignore any reform of the program. Instead, it changed its name. The children’s psychiatric facility became the Albert J. Solnit Children’s Center, honoring Yale child psychiatrist Dr. Albert J. Solnit. But changing the name on the building did not change the system.
More than a decade later, AbleChild returned to the campus. What AbleChild found was alarming. Instead of a modern therapeutic environment, the property appeared neglected and deteriorated. Years of taxpayer funding had not produced a campus that reflected healing, safety, or responsible stewardship of public resources. AbleChild raised the same questions: why should the taxpayers continue to trust the behavioral health providers?
Connecticut’s own auditors provide part of the answer. The Department of Children and Families (DCF) has repeatedly failed to properly account for taxpayer-funded property. According to the most recent audit, the agency could not account for nearly $262,000 in state-owned assets, failed to complete required inventories, and maintained inaccurate property records. Even more troubling, auditors found that similar deficiencies have been cited for more than twenty years, demonstrating a pattern of recurring management failures rather than isolated mistakes.
DCF is responsible for more than $274 million in state property and equipment. If the agency cannot accurately account for taxpayer-funded assets or correct problems that auditors have identified decade after decade, taxpayers have every reason to question why the answer is always additional funding.
The Solnit Center has become a symbol of a larger problem. Every few years, Connecticut taxpayers hear the same explanation: the buildings are old, staffing is difficult, and more funding is needed. Yet the same complaints continue while facilities deteriorate, audit findings repeat themselves, and meaningful reform never seems to arrive.
At some point, taxpayers deserve accountability. Children in state care deserve excellent schools, vocational education, apprenticeships, mentoring, life-skills training, recreational opportunities, stable family and community support, and programs that prepare them for adulthood. They deserve every opportunity to build independent, productive lives.
The population also deserve protection from unnecessary exposure to powerful psychiatric drugs. Many psychiatric medications prescribed to children—including several antidepressants—carry FDA boxed warnings about an increased risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviors in children, adolescents, and young adults.
Those warnings should compel the state to provide children with exit ramps to these cocktails of psychiatric drugs or at the very least to use these drugs cautiously, with rigorous oversight, informed consent, and continuous evaluation of safer and more effective alternatives.
Connecticut should open its child welfare system to educators, vocational trainers, mentors, nonprofit organizations, faith-based charities, community groups, and other providers outside the traditional behavioral health industry. Public dollars should follow programs that produce measurable results—educational achievement, employment, independent living, family stability, and successful transitions into adulthood.
For too long, the behavioral health system has largely measured success by services delivered and dollars spent, while taxpayers are given little evidence that children leave the system healthier, more independent, or better prepared for life.
The Solnit Center has had decades to prove its value. Before lawmakers approve another $23 million, they should answer one question that every Connecticut taxpayer deserves to hear: What has all that money bought?
If the answer is deteriorating buildings, repeated audit findings, continued dependence on psychiatric drugs, and another request for millions more, then Connecticut should stop investing in a failed institutional model and start investing in the futures of the children it has a duty to protect.
AbleChild is a 501(3) C nonprofit organization that has recently co-written landmark legislation in Tennessee, setting a national precedent for transparency and accountability in the intersection of mental health, pharmaceutical practices, and public safety.
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Damaging children is part of the Deep State's plan to hinder civilization.
The ever growing "mental health" industry is a scam. Just some "educated" people putting labels on others for profit.
Investigations into what the education system has been able to do for the last 70 years and we find suspect hiding in plain sight. The definition of Insanity is what they did to the children.
If really investigated, public school systems, according to real experts, would be found to have a sexual abuse (pedophelia) rate 8-10 times higher than the only entity ever investigated: the Catholic Church. And that abuse was homosexual, as the kids abused were 12-16 years old. Post pubescent because pedo means child.
And the Protestant church, Hasidic church, Orthodox Church, Mormon church….
Look what the colleges are turning out…
ALCATRAZ
everyone including the professors are on "the rock"
What did you expect from stolen valor Sens Blumenthal, comrade Murphy and nut case purple hair Rosa DeLauro anyway?
"…taxpayers should be asking one simple question: Where has all mental health and behavioral health money gone?"
Right idea, wrong question.
The question should be, "whose offshore accounts did all this money got to?"
One on one is very expensive. They should be restrained.
BIG PHARMA sure did attract the foreign doctors!
Look it up
Yep- it's clawback time…
There is just so much money the state can steal from working people to fund their graft. Because of that, tough choices have to be made.
There is never enough money to fund proper behavioral health for children and loot the state funds too. They had to choose.
Sorry families; sorry children.
They're not sorry – they are GREEDY.
Another blue State run into the ground by the left…
Maybe the feds can take it away from the state, which is incapable of running much, and put in the hands of a private, "trusted" (?) entity. Out of state and federal control, totally.
Everyone took advantage of the system now theres no resources to help those who it was intended for. Socialism.
Socialism is SUPPOSED to take from everyone for the masses. REAL socialism has altruistic roots but there is no way that can ever work because there is just too much money to be stolen and redirected. Communism is what is actually happening and it's right before our eyes.
Altruism is the core lie.
Well, the real question is the intent of the ones talking altruism. The intent of it has good roots but is completely impossible to implement. This is why the constant resurgence of Socialism always rallies the hippies that say that it was never done right or it would work. You can’t separate the greed from the process. People will always give generously to altruistic purposes and the receivers of it will always extort it leaving nothing to actually good things with.
I said that.
Thanks.
They Need to just quit robbing everyone for all their failure projects and we will be able to afford to take care of our own.
We HAD mental institutions in this country and they shut almost all of them down. Why? Because they were nothing but human trafficking warehouses that treated "patients" like cattle and billed exorbitant prices for services never rendered. They tortured and murdered through negligence and greed. Being as "mental health" is a health care thing… and we know how screwed up that whole thing is (the Somalians figured out how to take a big piece of that pile as well) I don't think that mental health facilities can ever be a functional thing. If they don't get government funding they won't even waste their time creating them and if they do get government funding, most of it will go into the admin's pockets.
At least they werent on the streets.
Like now.
Yeah they were. I remember a decade or two before they shut them down and we still had LOTS of mental degenerates out and about. They only housed the most dysfunctional of the group. It was this reason that they used them for testing and experimentation. Society said that these people had no purpose or rights and they were throw away’s. We have an epidemic now though due to drugs and big pharma doing their testing live and sanctioned through the medical community. Politics has been weaponized to enhance the zombie armies. I don’t think you could build enough facilities to house the nuts these days.
I see you argue just to argue.
We should just go back to warehousing.
Its time for final solutions or we lose the nation.
Apparently, I like to wrestle with pigs. I wasn’t arguing, providing a counterpoint. That is how discourse is done. You can take it or leave it and all things considered, I don’t give a shit what your opinion of it all is if you are only out here to believe that you cornered the market on facts. Warehousing does nothing and is the next step towards just whacking everyone you think doesn’t belong in society. Bet if I went back into your historic posts, somewhere in there I’d find statements in there about how there should be no prisons and we should just take these people out to save money since prisons don’t rehabilitate anyone. I don’t care if that is your opinion or not but your bent is towards removal of all that offend you. We have already lost the nation. The stink of death has become normalized.
I dont need a counter point.
Im past debate.
Thanks.
The money is spent on 1:1 care. It is very expensive. In my opinion these kids aren't going anywhere and should be kept in rubber rooms.
Once a manufacturing powerhouse and arsenal of the nation.
Now one big liberal toilet.
Fraud and corruption live here.
Thank God I escaped.
Psychiatry and psychology are medical FRAUD
Autism, all of it, FRAUD
Expose, defund, confiscate stolen dollars & prosecute these criminals!
"maffs beez wayciss…"
If at first you don't succeed, get more taxpayer money.
"Psychiatric drugs" are brain and mind altering substances.
It's a no-brainer that they outright experiment on patients. The tell is the ever changing cocktails of pills they poke down human throats, telling them, this will make them think or feel 'better.'
No different than the meth peddled on every CA street corner.
The whole industry should be banned from society for the damage they have caused. Not a single 'practitioner' can point to an outcome that comes close to justifying the wide spread damage we see to people all around us. This was exposed by a journalist simply asking the question "how many people have you cured?" at a psychiatrist convention. Not a single 'doctor' answered the question with any positive assurance that THEY in particular could cite.
Every 'patient' should be put on a strict diet of organically grown food, prepared in kitchens, and served without ANY added chemicals, at all. A diet high in good fats and proteins that feed and support the brain and body. This would most likely 'cure' a good portion, with the rest of them set to a natural, clean body standard for further education and rehabilitation.
The goal was never for actually curing anyone. It was for a live test facility that could do diabolical things behind closed doors for "patient privacy" and a way to steal trillions of dollars a year. Deep down, the medicinal and pharma industries don't care at all about people, just the money that can be made off of them.
Looking at this facility it looks like it’s intent is to make children psychiatrically more ill. Who would get better staying there? It should be shut down permanently.
If it is like most government, half the budget goes to salaries and pension benefits…..
Just about all state government pension systems are money pits now…..
Unless a person has worked with this population they have no idea what they are talking about. They are explosive and violent and only medication will help. They beat up staff because staff can't lay a finger on them.
I did work in one of these type of Dept Of Correction Facilities, A State Facility for the Extremely Dangerous Juvenile Offender's and you are correct, they are very difficult to work with. But, they can be delt with and controlled with proper training, staffing and treatment. "We" did have our fair share of bad days but overall "we" did Maintain Control very well.