She recalls the first time she tried to kill herself with little emotion, the way other children might remember learning to ride a bike.

“I think I was 7 or 8,” she says. “I was going through a lot of problems. I felt bad that I never had no family.”

She had been in foster care since she was 4. Her father was in prison. State caseworkers found her and her younger sister wandering alone in a park.

They bounced from foster home to foster home and were separated. The older girl was abused in foster homes, court records show. She contracted syphilis when she was 8 years old.

She spent five years of her adolescence confined to residential treatment centers. She has no photos of herself from her 13 years in state custody and recalls only two birthday parties — one in the chambers of a judge who presided over her case.

She became pregnant after leaving residential treatment. She is now 18, a mother and, for the moment, living with a foster family.

Hers is one of the faces of about 500 Florida kids, children as young as 3 and teens up to age 18, who are tucked away, sometimes far from home, in residential treatment centers.

Some of these children are severely disturbed.

There is, for instance, the 6-year-old boy whose mother sold his body to men. The girl who swallowed glass. The boy who ate tires. The teen-age girl who stole cars and was charged with assault for attacking her grandmother.

“These are kids who grow up with no one reading to them, no one tucking them into bed,” said Paul Cohen, a therapist at Walden Community School in Miami Springs, which houses 30 emotionally disturbed adolescents. “It’s amazing where they’ve come from, that they’ve survived.”

Miami residents Myrlene Augustin-Cox and her husband tried to do all the right things with their adopted son, Clint. But the scars were deep when he came to them.

When Clint was 2, his mother died of an aneurysm. He was alone with her body for two days, said Augustin-Cox, the child’s aunt.

As a young boy, Clint threw vicious tantrums.

“He didn’t know how to play with other kids,” Augustin-Cox said. “He would fight. He bit me” in the face.

Clint attacked members of his new parents’ church. He set fires in the house while Augustin-Cox was pregnant.

“While the firefighters were here, he was setting another one,” she said.

Clint’s parents, both social workers, pleaded with the state for help and got Clint, now 11, into Walden Community School this spring. He returned home to his family last week.

Some children living in intensive, residential treatment centers are like Clint, with emotional problems so severe their parents are unable to handle them.

Wrong side of the law

Others first land in juvenile detention centers, arrested for hurting someone or for selling or using drugs, for instance, and end up in treatment centers to bring them under control. Nationally, the federal government estimates that 60 percent of teens who are arrested have a behavioral, mental or emotional problem.

Some kids are in treatment centers only because the state doesn’t have enough foster homes, particularly for those children who are defiant, fight and run away.

But most kids in residential treatment centers are foster children who have been abused, neglected or abandoned by their families.

“I used to be angry at the whole world,” said one former foster child from Miami who is now 19. “My problems were everybody’s fault.”

She never wanted to be in foster care, never liked where the state put her. She ran away to the streets and had sex with older men. The girl suffered one disappointment after another. After being taken from her abusive family, she was adopted by another family, but her adoptive parents also beat her, according to court records.

Then she went to live with her grandmother. When her mother died, her anger built to a crescendo.

“I tried to kill my grandmother,” she said. “I took her pills from her, her heart medicine. Started bothering her.”

Why?

“Because she made me mad.”

Such anger, hurt, abuse may seem for many parents and children almost impossible to imagine. And yet the mental and emotional problems kids experience appear to be common.

No comprehensive studies have been done to measure the prevalence of mental health problems in children. The federal government has contemplated conducting a study, but it would have to be on the scale of a national census, which critics say would be costly and invade the privacy of millions of families.

The federal government estimates, using eight smaller-scale studies completed in the last 15 years, that one child in 10 has a mental illness that causes substantial impairment, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Researchers say they began to realize the scope of the problem only within the last three decades. They now know that children develop the same psychiatric disorders as adults and may even be more susceptible.

“There’s this sort of fantasy that children are protected from these things,” said Michael Hughes, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Miami. “In fact, it’s the opposite.”

Children ‘vulnerable’

While children are more resilient, they’re also more at risk, Hughes said. They need a stable, loving home life to develop properly.

“Children are much more vulnerable to what happens in their families, to the death of a parent, mental illness in the family, financial difficulties,” Hughes said.

And today’s world, experts say, is particularly hard for children. Many are products of divorce. Poverty, and drugs and alcohol, also are major societal factors. So may be violence, which most children see in the movies and on television. And many live with it directly, witnessing domestic violence or experiencing it themselves.

In a recent University of Miami study, researchers interviewed 2,000 youths chosen at random and found that more than a third said they had been shot at or threatened with a weapon. One in four knew someone who had committed suicide.

Almost two-thirds of African-American youths surveyed said they knew someone who had been murdered.

Any or all of those factors, the experts say, may help to explain that more than 1 million children a year are abused or neglected, and that suicide rates among youths ages 15 to 19 have tripled since 1960.

Those factors also may be why admissions of children to psychiatric units in the United States have exploded in the past three decades, increasing from 10,000 to 48,000 in one four-year period in the ’80s.

“The magnitude and severity of stressors in people’s lives are greater than they used to be,” said R. Jay Turner, the lead researcher in the UM study. “We’ve got lots of problems, no question about that.”