Nowhere to Go: Mentally ill youth in crisis
Scott Pelley reports on severe shortcomings in the state of mental health care for young people in the U.S.
Last November 19th, Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds was slashed and stabbed repeatedly by his own son. Gus Deeds was 24 years old and had been struggling with mental illness. He and his father had been in an emergency room just hours before the attack but didn't get the help that they needed.
The story of what went wrong with his medical care exposes a problem in the way that America handles mental health. It's a failure that came to the fore with the murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School....
... The vast majority of mental patients are not violent. But this is a story about the fraction who are a danger to themselves or others. Parents of mentally ill children in crisis often find, as Sen. Deeds did, that they have nowhere to go. Creigh Deeds bears the scars of this failure on his face, his body and his soul.Creigh Deeds: I really don't want Gus to be defined by his illness. I don't want Gus to be defined by what happened on the 19th. Gus was a great kid. He was a perfect son. It's clear the system failed. It's clear that it failed Gus. It killed Gus.
We met Creigh Deeds four weeks after the attack. He was still distraught. But he told us his story was a warning that could not wait....
... Scott Pelley: What would have saved Gus?
Creigh Deeds: If he could have been hospitalized that night, they could have gotten him medicated, and I could have worked to get Gus in some sort of long term care....
... Brian Geyser: You know, every day, we have 10 to 20 kids with psychiatric problems come into our emergency department, kids who wanna kill themselves, who've tried to kill themselves, who've tried to kill somebody else.
Brian Geyser is a nurse practitioner we met in the emergency department of Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut-- it's one of the best in the nation in psychiatry.
Brian Geyser: We have 52 psychiatric beds here at Yale. And right now, all 52 are full. And so the seven kids that are here in the emergency room are waiting for an open bed.
Scott Pelley: How long will they wait?
Brian Geyser: Five of them have been here three days already....
... They wanted to discharge my daughter. She needed to stay where she was safe and the insurance company would not pay and so I was told by our social worker in the hospital that if I gave my daughter up to Department of Children and Families, that then she would have insurance coverage through the state and she would be allowed to stay....
... The state of Virginia is investigating why there was no hospital bed for Gus Deeds that night. Nationwide, since 2008, states have cut $4.5 billion from mental health care funding....
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mentally-ill-youth-in-crisis/
