Overview
Thirteen-year-old Christy Scheck was having trouble at home. Angry with her tough, no-nonsense father, she kept running away, often disappearing for days at a time. When the family therapist proposed that Christy spend some time just down the road at the Southwood Psychiatric Center, the Scheck family - including Christy herself - readily agreed. But something went terribly wrong. On March 6, 1992, while on full-time suicide watch, Christy Scheck was found hanged with the sash of her terry-cloth robe wound tightly around her neck. In A Wrongful Death, bestselling author Leon Bing documents the gripping story of a mother's search for the truth behind the death of her child. That quest helped bring down one of the nation's most powerful mental-health providers, National Medical Enterprises, Southwood's parent company. In the course of her research, Bing found that Southwood was an institution corroded by greed and bad management, with a corporate system designed to extract extraordinary levels of profit: insurance claims processed to maximize reimbursements; staff "charting" parties in which patients' records were changed to reflect a need for continued treatment; psychiatrists' hours drastically reduced; and families shut out of the decision-making process. All of these activities ensured that during the time she was a patient, Christy Scheck did not receive proper or even adequate treatment. As a result, her three-month stay at the facility ended in her suicide."...a critical examination into the suicide of Christy Scheck, who hanged herself in a psychiatric center despite being on suicide watch, and how Scheck's mother investigated the mental-health provider and helped bring them down."
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
In November 1991, Christy Scheck's parents brought her to Southwood Psychiatric Center in Chula Vista, Calif., for help. Their 13-year-old daughter had moved beyond adolescent acting up to theft and self-mutilation. They didn't know that the hospital's CEO was using devious means to make a profit in an era of increasingly stringent insurance company guidelines. Records were rigged to indicate need for continual treatment; families were excluded from decision-making; and while psychiatrists' hours were reduced, therapy sessions were conducted by unlicensed mental-health counselors and interns. The dangerous, hallucination-inducing dosages of medication given to Christy were only one element of the poor care at SPC. Worse, Christy was only casually monitoreddespite being on a suicide watchand after four months at SPC, she killed herself. Within weeks, the Schecks brought a lawsuit against SPC and National Medical Enterprises (NME), the hospital's $4 billion corporate parent. Bing (Smoked) documents the downfall of NME, and she intertwines the Scheck tragedy with a litany of illegal practices and the excesses of corporate greed. "Marketing was God," a former Southwood marketing executive told the author. Bing, who was motivated by her own experiences as an employee at a San Fernando Valley psychiatric facility in 1985, skillfully combines conversations with the Scheck family and with former SPC personnel with exhaustive research into financial figures and reports of related cases. This is a powerful and moving story, complete with a villainous corporation, a heroic mother and a sadly pathetic victim that is certain to interest filmmakers. Author tour. (Sept.)Kirkus Reviews
In this riveting account of how one child died at the hands of the health-care system that would save her, Bing brings to light a mechanism gone wild with greed and obscured by the silence of knowing collaborators.In the preface to her account of the Scheck family's disastrous encounter with a for-profit psychiatric facility, journalist Bing (Do or Die, 1991; Smoked, 1993) makes it clear that, having worked for a while in a drug-rehab program, she has firsthand knowledge of just how two-faced, how lacking in facilities, and how poorly staffed that system can be. Christy Scheck's hanging death while interned at a facility owned by National Medical Enterprises (NME) began with a system that made its diagnosis based on the bottom line: the availability and extent of the patient's insurance. The tomboyish 13-year-old, whose close relationship with her father, based on her athleticism, was being disrupted by her maturation, claimed he had sexually molested her—a lie which became the currency that bought her needed attention once she was cut off from her own family by the facility's undertrained staff. Incorrectly prescribed drugs, the encouragement to embellish her lies, and inadequate staffing all culminated in Christy's suicide. Her case was not unique. NME finally fell in the early '90s—suffering roughly $80 billion in losses—brought down by lawsuits by the Schecks and other families and patients who had suffered from NME's corrupt practices at facilities from coast to coast. Bing makes clear how human damage can be perpetrated by any institution that sees profit before real care.
This is a devastating account in which facts fall like dominoes. It should alert us to the dangers of centralized institutions that have taken leave of their senses. Unforgettable.