Referring to newly passed reforms as “modest,” state Sen. Creigh Deeds said Monday that he plans to keep the pressure on his colleagues to fix Virginia’s long-troubled mental health system.
“My scars aren’t going away,” Deeds (D-Bath) told an audience at the National Press Club on Monday. “Believe me, I’m not done.”
Deeds said he would not take questions about the events of last November, when his son Austin “Gus” Deeds, 24, attacked his father with a knife and then fatally shot himself, after a psychiatric bed could not be found within the legally mandated six-hour limit.
“The issue is much bigger than any one person’s experience,” said Deeds, who ran for governor in 2009.
But he frequently touched on his family’s experience with the state’s mental health system as he discussed the need to end the stigma around mental illness and his determination to push for additional reform.
Deeds spoke of the variation in access to mental health services across the state, especially in poorer, rural areas, where a smaller population and longer driving distances pose unique barriers to care. An inspector general report on his son’s death released last week noted that distance played a role in the delayed arrival of the mental health evaluator who was charged with examining Gus Deeds. The evaluator arrived at Bath Community Hospital three hours after a sheriff’s deputy had brought the young man there for an examination, significantly reducing the time left to find a bed. After Deeds’s death, two hospitals said they had room but were not contacted.
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Creigh Deeds vows to keep working on Virginia’s mental health system
Couldn't get help for his son, who then killed himself after attacking father.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much to NASGA for posting this story.
ReplyDeleteVirginia's mental health officials continue their short-sighted practice of "streeting" mentally ill people, tossing them in jail, or dumping them in hellholes like those run by the notorious Scott Schuett, sometimes with the help of public guardianship programs like Jewish Family Service of Tidewater and Catholic Charities of Eastern Virginia.
There is a public safety aspect to our public mental health system that is often downplayed or ignored.
Creigh Deeds and Gus Deeds are far from the only victims of the Commonwealth's failed mental health system. The thirty two people killed and the seventeen injured in the Virginia Tech massacre are the most well known, but there are many, many others.
It is long past time for Virginia to set aside its prejudices and excuses, and make ALL of the reforms necessary to protect the seriously mentally ill, their family members, and the public.
He's turning the tragedy into helping others. That's good.
ReplyDeleteI agree. The mentally ill get a bad wrap and more could be done. It's good of Mr. Deeds to take up this cause.
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