"An Ohio youth prison guard has been fired and two others disciplined after a teen offender's attempt to hang himself in a juvenile detention cell was ignored.
A state investigative report obtained by The Associated Press says the guard saw the youth with a blanket around his neck, noted the suicide attempt on a log and walked away without intervening.
The report says two other guards who were later suspended knew the youth may have been attempting to try to kill himself but failed to check on the teen, who survived."
If Dr. Shawn Christopher Shea ever serves as a plaintiff expert, I would appreciate being told about it. I would intervene in the case, and seek to have a mistrial, with costs assessed to the assets of this peddler of garbage science.
"A sound suicide assessment approach or protocol is made up of 3 components:
• Gathering information related to risk factors, protective factors, and warning signs of suicide.
• Collecting information related to the patient’s suicidal ideation, planning, behaviors, desire, and intent.
• Making a clinical formulation of risk based on these 2 databases.
Practical approaches to integrating these 3 aspects of a suicide assessment have been well delineated for adults and adolescents.1-8 Innovative systematic approaches, such as the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS) approach created by David Jobes,9 have also been developed for integrating all 3 tasks while providing collaborative intervention, which may help lay the foundation for a more evidence-based protocol for suicide assessment. Recently, Joiner and colleagues10 have delineated a promising approach based on the interpersonal theory of suicide, which gracefully integrates all 3 components necessary for a suicide assessment."
The court wants prison guards to have training and to report suicidal gestures and threats.
The court wants to enrich tort lawyers. About a third of the beds in prison are filled by straight mental patients. So this decision will generate a lot of lawyer fees.
The dissent should be read as a checklist of defenses for the government entity.
To end lawsuits for suicide because they contradict the modern, multi-factorial understanding of the causes of suicide, and indirectly hurt many unseen patients. The sole claim for suicide with merit involves assisting the suicide in violation of law.
This site is for defendants and defense lawyers in suicide malpractice suits, to improve defense expert testimony, perhaps to reduce losses in adverse settlements or verdicts.
These settlements and judgments devastate the practice of psychiatry. They cause the needless incarceration of thousands of suicidal patients without proof of benefit. The resulting defensive treatments consume a large fraction of the budget for wasteful treatment and starve proven preventive measures. These lawsuits are also morally wrong. They extort money from the party least influential in the many factors causing the suicide of the victim, the clinician trying to help. If they continue, the most suicidal and neediest patients will be avoided.
Explaining modern, multi-factorial understanding of the causes of suicide in plain language may result in more common sense judgments from jurors. The defendant may also prosecute, with licensing boards and in court, attorneys promulgating "junk science." The frivolous, malpractice lawsuit, because of profound, indirect impact on medical costs and life threatening errors, is another serious ethical lapse.
In systems closed to attorneys (e.g. the military), the rate of suicide may be cut by a large fraction reliably, quickly, at almost no additional expense.
A psychiatrist runs this site. It gives moral support to the civil defendant's determination to defend clinical care from vicious lawyer predators and their misleading expert collaborators.
