Psychiatric Malpractice Attorneys in Connecticut

Failure to Protect a Patient from the Risk of Suicide

Suicide and suicide attempts are serious public health problems that devastate individuals, families, and communities. Claiming more lives than car crashes, and more than twice as many as homicides, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s final data for 2015. Depression and other mental illnesses, or a substance abuse disorder (often with other mental disorders) are present in more than 90% of people who commit suicide.

When a person who has suicide risk factors comes into contact with the medical community, whether in an emergency room, a psychiatrist’s office, or with a primary care physician or family doctor, the medical profession has a responsibility to help that person as it would with any another illness. When the proper steps are taken, nearly all suicides are preventable, which is what makes inpatient suicide so troubling.

Contact RisCassi & Davis, P.C. today to schedule a free initial consultation with our Connecticut psychiatric malpractice lawyers. We are here to help.

What Is Acceptable Suicide Prevention?

Clinically, suicide prevention begins with a suicide risk assessment. The failure to conduct such an assessment, or a poorly handled assessment, can result in the suicide of a patient. Emergency departments are often faced with important decisions about the care and discharge of patients with suicide risk. For instance, when a hospital’s emergency department undertakes to care for a person after a suicide attempt, healthcare providers will evaluate the person’s physical and mental health. This evaluative process is complex, detailed, and time-consuming informed by a physician’s training and experience. It’s an active process in which the clinician is evaluating suicidal intent and lethality, dynamic meanings and motivations for suicide, the presence of a suicidal plan, the presence of overt suicidal/self-destructive behavior, the patient’s physiological, cognitive, and affective states, his or her coping potential, and epidemiologic risk factors.

The process is complicated by the fact that most suicidal people are highly ambivalent – they wish to die and they wish to live. And, if they are planning to commit suicide, they can be unreliable sources of information on certain issues.

Establishing a Treatment Plan

After a thorough assessment has been conducted, an individual treatment plan must be designed. Success is more likely when the treatment plan rests on a solid foundation of data and assessment.

Psychiatrists (and other medical doctors or providers) in Connecticut have a duty to involuntarily commit a patient who is suicidal or poses an imminent risk of self-harm if efforts at encouraging voluntary admission fail. Giving the evaluative process short shrift or failing to appropriately respond to the clinical presentation can be deadly.

In such instances, a medical malpractice lawsuit may be necessary to hold a healthcare provider accountable and to ensure that the opportunity to prevent further avoidable deaths is not squandered. For instance, a psychiatrist or other healthcare provider may be liable for failing to properly assess a patient’s suicide risk by failing to learn about prior suicide attempts, suicidality, and feelings of hopelessness and anxiety, by failing to take into account the person’s behavior prior to discharge from the hospital, or failure to adequately obtain and consider data from collateral sources such as the patient’s family.

Separating Fact from Fiction

There are few medical events more stigmatized or with more popular misconceptions and myths than suicide. Perhaps the most prevalent myth is that many or most people who have attempted suicide or expressed suicidal ideation are “destined” to commit suicide and nothing and no one can prevent it from happening.

In fact, 90% of those who attempt suicide do not go on to die by suicide. Although a suicide attempt is a risk factor that places an individual at a substantially higher risk of suicide than the general population, 99% of people who have attempted suicide and survive are alive one year after that episode, and 65% are alive 30 years later. If one can get a suicidal person through the period of crisis that has resulted in an attempt, most of the time he or she will go on to have a relatively normal life expectancy and lead a rewarding and productive life.

If a loved one of yours committed suicide while in the care of a medical professional in Connecticut, call (860) 245-2412 to speak to a qualified Connecticut psychiatric malpractice attorney.