Bipolar Today

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If you are feeling suicidal, please call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) in the United States or visit this page from the International Association for Suicide Prevention to find one in your country.

A family has just won a $2.2 settlement with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation after their 16-year-old daughter attempted suicide in the mental ward of Camarillo Youth Correctional Facility. Their daughter, Shanelle Crawford, was bipolar and had attempted suicide before, and had been left unmonitored in her room. She covered the windows in her room for eight minutes, and was then found to have attempted to kill herself by hanging on a bed sheet. She is now seriously brain damaged, and the money will help the family in providing her with care for the rest of her life. The goal of the family is to ensure that their daughter can be cared for at home. More information about this story can be found in the Ventura County Star here.

Commentary

This is an extremely sad story in which a young woman nearly died, and has suffered serious injury as a result. Although the case was never brought to court, the case provides an instance of two important principles. First, mental institutions have an absolute duty to prevent their suicidal patients from committing suicide. They really can’t argue that they tried. Since Ms. Crawford died on their watch, they are responsible.

Second, this case really shows some of the tension between the needs of modesty and privacy among patients and the need to monitor them constantly. The reason Ms. Crawford was able to close her curtains all (let alone for eight minutes) was because female patients were given a few minutes to change despite this being against regulations. In other words, the institution’s solution to giving patients privacy was to have a regulation and then not to enforce it. Either the institution should have recognized the possibility that modesty for suicidal patients is simply impossible, or they should have found ways to do this while allowing patients to be safe (such as having only female staff monitoring women’s windows, for example). Their solution, however, was no solution at all.

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4. Family-to-Family Education Program Starts
5. Book Describes Bipolar Life From a Parental Perspective