60 Minutes: Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds and mental health

[ScreamingMeemie]

Powerful stuff if you get a chance to watch it.

If you remember, last fall his son Gus stabbed him several times before killing himself with a gunshot to the head. Creigh had spent the previous days trying to get his son into a hospital even after a judge had signed an involuntary commitment order (no beds were available).


http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/virginia-politics/creigh-deeds-signals-that-he-may-sue-over-his-mentally-ill-sons-treatment-and-death/2014/05/15/1bc4a2a2-dc64-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html

Deeds (Bath), the Democratic nominee for governor in 2009, has only occasionally spoken publicly about the attack. But his letter reveals previously unknown details about the case, including an allegation that it took the psychiatric evaluator more than an hour to arrive at the hospital after he was called, leading to the expiration of an emergency custody order before a hospital bed could be found for his son.

Deeds also wrote that the evaluator, Mike Gentry, contacted only seven facilities — not the 10 he claimed to have contacted — and did not fax the younger Deeds’s report to three private hospitals, two of which later said they had beds available.

[LuvNewcastle]

1. I'd have to get the psychiatrist's side

of the situation before I made a judgement here. If everything Deeds says is true, it looks like malpractice to me. A lot of people still don't take mental illness as seriously as physical illnesses, even a lot of mental health professionals. Regardless of the outcome in this case, I hope it leads to greater awareness of the severity of many mental illnesses.

[elehhhhna]

2. a number of local treatment centers said they had beds when the story first broke

iirc the state confimed this.