Dying for Attention: A psychiatric patient dies in hospital emergency room

The behavior of the staff of Brooklyn’s KIngs County Hospital didn’t surprise me. Oh,  like most, I immediately had many visceral reactions–most strongly among them disgust, frustration, shock–after watching the video that shows an unidentified woman falling out of a chair to the floor, struggling weakly, but being unable to get up, and finally dying, dying, while hospital staff–security guards, aides, nurses, and a doctor–ignored the woman’s distress for more than an hour.  

But I know that many–okay, I’ll say most–of the staff employed in psychiatric facilities routinely attribute all behavior to psychiatric/psychological reasons. In other words, doctors, nurses, mental health techs, et al, believe that anything a psych patient does is done solely to manipulate or to gain undeserved attention. Complaints offered up by patients are seen as attempts to gain some sort of unfair or undeserved privilege or sympathy or perk or even just the thrill of knowing that the patient has “put one over” on the staff.

And staff don’t like to think that they have been “had”, so they rationalize that the patient is faking any sort of distress. Readers who know the story of eleven-year-old Andrew McClain, a former patient of mine who died in a Connecticut while being restrained, already know how that kind of thinking turns out.

In a weak defense of mental health care staff, I will say that some psychiatric patients will pass gas, urinate, vomit, defecate, and do any other nasty thing they can think of to show their disrespect toward staff, and because staff know this, they often ignore the behavior. But anyone working in the medical field knows, or should know, that these bodily responses are signs of distress, of the sphincter muscles relaxing. Of death.

Unfortunately, for our still-unidentified Kings County Hospital patient–and her parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, children, grandchildren, friends, acquaintances, and neighbors–Kings County Hospital staff never got close enough to the patient to determine whether or not her distress was real. And, so she died. Face down, alone, on the cold hard tile floor of an inhospitable, uncaring, unprofessional institution that she–or someone who cared about her–trusted.   

These Kings County Hospital employees should be held accountable for not properly caring for this woman. their patient. For those who hold licenses, such as the doctor and the nurses, consideration should be given to whether or not they should keep those licenses. 

And the rest of us–you included–should think about how we would tend to a woman who is lying, dying in front of us. Would you overly-pathologize her behavior because she is a known psychiatric patient or would you treat her as you would want a member of your family to be treated? As a valuable human who is now lost to us. Think about it.