Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:When someone with Rob Reiner's level of wealth and connections can't get help for his adult son, what chance do the rest of us have?
Exactly!
Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds is the epitome of this problem, and he readily shares the story of how he tried to get his son hospitalized while in crisis and when there wasn’t a bed immediately available in northern Virginia, the medical system sent them home and the next morning his son tried to kill him and then killed himself - also a knife attack on the father, but he killed himself with a gun.
On November 19, 2013, Deeds was stabbed multiple times at his home in Bath County, Virginia by his 24-year-old son, Gus, who then shot himself.[7] Deeds was initially reported to be in critical condition at University of Virginia Medical Center.[8][9] Although a judge had issued an involuntary commitment order for Gus, and despite an intensive search, no available hospital bed could be found to provide him mental health treatment in the days before the attempted murder and he was released home without the ordered treatment.[10] As a consequence, several changes were made in the screening and admission process for people undergoing an emergency psychiatric examination in Virginia.[11] These changes include 2014 Virginia Senate Bill 260, sponsored by Deeds.[12]
As a former county attorney who involuntarily committed dozens of people to the state hospital as well as to private facilities over the course of my years in that role, I can attest that only a tiny number of those commitments remained in custody longer than a week or two. One young man whose family had cut him down from a tree where he hanged himself was returned into the community after THREE DAYS at the state hospital.
My time in the family and criminal and child dependency courts taught me that our mental health system is ABYSMAL, from sea to shining sea. It’s an underfunded underresourced poorly regulated MESS, and we pay for it in dozens of ways across our society. But it seems there is no real will to fix it, on either side of the aisle.