Their kids died on the psych ward. They were far from alone
LOS ANGELES - Mia St. John's cellphone lit up with a message from the psychiatrist treating her son. The voicemail shimmered with hope, the first she had felt in months.
The doctor said Julian, admitted to a psychiatric facility with schizophrenia, seemed more cheerful, was talking more with other patients and would soon begin a new art project.
"Very happy to see he's coming around a bit," the doctor said.
It was November 2014, and Julian, 24, had been living at La Casa Mental Health Rehabilitation Center in Long Beach for two months. Mia and her ex-husband, Kristoff St. John, had resorted to involuntarily committing their son after he threatened to kill himself in September.
But three days after Mia received the physician's voicemail, she got another call from La Casa. This time the message offered only despair.
Julian had suffocated himself with a plastic bag. Her son was dead.
How many others die in California psychiatric facilities has been a difficult question to answer. No single agency keeps tabs on the number of deaths at psychiatric facilities in California, or elsewhere in the nation.
In an effort to assess the scope of the problem, the Los Angeles Times submitted more than 100 public record requests to nearly 50 county and state agencies to obtain death certificates, coroner's reports and hospital inspection records with information about these deaths.
The Times review identified nearly 100 preventable deaths over the last decade at California psychiatric facilities. It marks the first public count of deaths at California's mental health facilities and highlights breakdowns in care at these hospitals as well as the struggles of regulators to reduce the number of deaths.
The total includes deaths for which state investigators determined that hospital negligence or malpractice
