(June 24, 2016) “The Desperate and the Dead,” a new, multi-part investigative series by the Boston Globe, examines the devastating consequences of the psychiatric bed shortage in Massachusetts and across the nation.
The first installment of the series focuses on families affected by untreated mental illness in the state (“Families in fear,” the Boston Globe, June 24).
“Few have paid a higher price for the nation’s mental health crisis than the loved ones of severely mentally ill people,” the Globe writes.
Families like Nancy Chiero and her 35-year-old son, Lee.
Lee’s life had been punctuated by severe mental illness, and a cycle had developed. A psychotic episode would send him to the emergency room. Once released, he would refuse to take his prescribed medications, the delusions would return and the cycle would repeat.
In January 2007, Nancy could see the cycle beginning again.
Lee had started to suspect that Nancy was involved in a plot against him and had been videotaping their conversations. He had disconnected computers and the electric power in the house to prevent his imagined enemies from spying. He believed he’d been abducted by aliens and abused by animals, and was terrified that he would be again.
Nancy had Lee rushed by ambulance to a Boston hospital. But at the hospital, Lee insisted he was fine and a psychiatrist released him after only four days because he “did not seem to present a danger to himself and others.”
Then, one morning shortly after he was discharged from the hospital, Lee lunged at Nancy in the kitchen of their Massachusetts home. He knocked her down the basement stairs, pulled out a knife and stabbed his mother to death.
“In the instant of her death at the hands of her son — a deeply troubled man discharged without restrictions from hospital care — Nancy Chiero wasn’t merely failed by the state mental health care system. She was her son’s mental health care system — or at least the only one he could rely on,” writes the Globe.
But Nancy and her son are not alone. The Globe reports that at least 17 parents with signs of mental illness allegedly killed their children from 2005 through 2015, and at least 18 sons and daughters with signs of mental illness were accused of killing their parents.
And the toll reaches far beyond family. In the past decade, 116 people in Massachusetts were accused of killing 139 victims.
Undoubtedly, these tragedies correlate with the insufficient number of public psychiatric beds available to the most severely mentally ill in the state.
Massachusetts currently maintains just 8.9 beds per 100,000 people, according to the 2016 Treatment Advocacy Center report, “Going, Going Gone: Trends and Consequences of Eliminating States Psychiatric Beds, 2016.” This number is far below the 50-bed standard considered necessary in order to provide minimally adequate treatment to people suffering with severe mental illness.
How many more tragedies must occur before preventative steps are taken in order to save lives?
The Treatment Advocacy Center thanks the Boston Globe Spotlight Team for illuminating the tragic consequences families face when they and their loved ones are locked out of treatment with no place to go.
Read “The Desperate and the Dead” and Donate today to help us advocate for the laws needed to help these families.
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