Virginia Senator Creigh Deeds is suing state and local mental health agencies over the death of his son, Gus. The 24-year-old took his own life in 2013 after attacking the senator with a knife outside their Bath County home. Deeds and his x-wife had begged the local mental health agency to hospitalize Gus, but a staffer claimed no hospital had room for him. Deeds is asking for $6 million, saying the state was negligent in failing to make recommended reforms that could have saved his son.
The suit was actually filed in November but received no media attention until this week, when The Rockbridge Advocate reported on the case. Sandy Hausman has details.
Gus Deeds was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder in 2011. Medication controlled the condition until 2013, when the former college student appeared to suffer a breakdown. Gus didn’t want to get help, so his father got a court order allowing the sheriff to take him to the Rockbridge Area Community Services Board, where the senator asked for help in finding a hospital bed. The law said Gus could be held against his will for just six hours. Creigh Deeds recalled the experience on the CBS news magazine Sixty Minutes.
“The whole afternoon Gus didn’t sit down," Deeds recalled. "He paced the floor. He’d look at me. He’d smile, and I just had this sinking feeling that he was coming home, and I was concerned that if he came home there was going to be a crisis.”
The following morning, as the senator prepared to feed his horses, Gus stabbed him repeatedly with a knife before heading into the house. Deeds made his way to a road near his Bath County home and was eventually taken by helicopter to the University of Virginia Medical Center, but the tragedy was not over.
“When I was in the rescue squad, a call came over the scanner that there had been somebody with a gunshot wound to the head," Deeds says. The gunshot victim was Gus.
Now, Deeds is suing the state, the local mental health agency and the staffer who sent Gus home. The lawsuit describes Virginia’s mental health system as fragmented and blames it for Gus’s death. At the National Alliance on Mental Illness of Virginia, Mira Signer declined comment on the case, but says the system is flawed.
“It’s confusing. It’s a maze," she explains. "You have a public system, layered with a private system and a legal system, and these systems don’t necessarily talk to each other. It is fragmented!”
She says funding for mental health services has been inadequate and uneven.
“Of the new funds proposed in the budget, only 8% are going to community-based mental health services.”
And Mira Signer worries that the governor’s new budget calls for closing the Catawba Hospital in Roanoke, a large center providing in-patient psychiatric care.
“It can be really difficult to find a hospital bed, and the state hospitals which are supposed to serve as a safety net have been downsized over the years.”
After his son’s death, Deeds told CBS Newsman Scott Pelly that he hoped the tragedy would lead to changes that might protect other families. It’s estimated one in four of them are touched by mental illness.
"There is just a lack of equity in the way we as a societylook at mental health issues," he said.
"Don’t want to fund it, don’t want to talk about it, don’t want to see it?" Pelly offered.
"That’s exactly right," Deeds replied. "But the reality is it’s everywhere. You’ve told us that you don’t want Gus to be defined by what happen in those few seconds. Right. I want people to remember the brilliant, friendly, loving kid that was Gus Deeds. We’ll use Gus, I hope to address mental health and to make sure that other people won’t have to suffer through this.”
Since the death of Gus Deeds, the state has extended the amount of time someone can be held against their will if they appear to be suffering a mental health crisis, from 6 to 8 hours, and Virginia has established an online registry showing which hospitals have space for patients in need of psychiatric services.