Psychiatrist Stephen Stathis supports push for secure "children's home" to break destructive cycle of troubled youths
AN "ABANDONED" tribe of Queensland teenagers are turning to prostitution to fund a drug-addled lifestyle, a senior psychiatrist has told the child protection inquiry.
The teens can be placed in care for drug-induced psychosis, but simply walk out after treatment.
Dr Stephen Stathis, the director of Child Psychiatry at the Royal Children's Hospital, has delivered some of the strongest evidence yet on the existence of a small group of teenagers frustrating police and social service agencies, and putting themselves and other Queenslanders at extreme risk.
Dr Stathis said he knows of kids wheeled into emergency wards in hysterics "seeing little green creatures" yet free to leave when the episode ends.
"They can go down to the Valley, which is 500 metres away, and do it all over again," Dr Stathis said.
Dr Stathis said many of the children, often living in residential care or foster care, had been abused both physically and verbally as infants, with studies indicating brain damage in some cases.
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"These kids have small brains, they have small temporal lobes ... the temporal lobe has not developed properly," he said.
The girls may continue the cycle by falling pregnant, simply because they want someone to love them.
"The child who is having the children needs to be nurtured themselves."
The inquiry has heard the state can pay up to $1 million a year to house just four children in one suburban home with round-the-clock care.
Dr Stathis has backed the idea of the secure "children's home" - already operating in England and Wales - a proposal which would return Queensland to a form of institutionalised care largely abandoned for the past two decades. 
Dr Stathis said in his experience a form of detention had an extraordinarily positive impact on kids living chaotic lives because of the absence of drugs, and the appearance of firm boundaries.
"You get them into the detention centre and they settle down," he said. Commissioner Tim Carmody suggested such children might be better off if protected for their own safety and the safety of others.
"The other less attractive option is to abandon them," Mr Carmody said.
"Well that's right, which is what effectively is happening now," Dr Stathis replied.
Mr Carmody said there was an obvious risk of the children falling into the homeless sub-class, struggling for resources such as government welfare.
"Mr Commissioner, their resource is their body, and that is what they use," Dr Stathis said.
Dr Stathis made further strong comments on the need to remove some kids from dysfunctional parents at an early age and effectively adopt them out. 
He acknowledged that past policies of child removal, especially on the basis of race which led to stolen generation, were wrong.(Yet this is what he is proposing remember...even though it is wrong by his own admission...)
But he said state sanctioned child removal was not always wrong when in the interests of children.
"Child removal might impact most heavily on the Indigenous community," he said.(What?)
"That is something we are going to have to grapple with."
The inquiry continues.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/national/psychiatrist-stephen-stathis-supports-... 
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