Large six figure recovery for suicide in hospital psychiatric unit

Suicide is a devastating event for any family to endure, particularly if it happens to a loved one
who is in a monitored environment inside a hospital.

In recent years, there has been much written and discussed about ways to prevent inpatient
suicide of patients in psychiatric units. Research shows that 70% of inpatient suicides occur by
hanging and 90% of those hangings take place in private areas such as bathrooms and bedrooms.
Therefore, safety groups have urged hospitals to reduce the risk of suicide by removing “ligature
points,” i.e., any object, including portions of doors, which can be used to anchor a noose made
from a belt, cord, or article of clothing.

In this case, the husband and father was admitted to a local psychiatric unit in the Pittsburgh area
after he barricaded himself in a room with a loaded gun and threatened to take his own life.
After de-escalating the situation, local police transported the patient to a nearby psychiatric
hospital for an involuntary commitment. Once in the psychiatric unit, he was placed in a single
room with instructions that he be checked by staff every 15 minutes. A few days into his
hospitalization, the patient asked to use the bathroom. A staff member unlocked the room and
allowed the patient to enter but then exited the room leaving the patient alone behind a locked
door. Within minutes of being left unattended, the patient used a hospital gown to make a noose
and anchored it over the top of the door to hang himself. The hospital had not installed safer
doors such as ones with angled tops or half doors, so-called “saloon doors,” which will not
anchor a noose.

Any suicide case presents challenges because usually the patient has already demonstrated an
earlier attempt to take their own life, and thus the hospital claims there is little they can do to
save a patient who is determined to harm himself. Nevertheless, it is the primary job of
psychiatric units to oversee such patients to prevent the very thing that the patient may be
inclined to attempt. In short, the whole job of the psychiatric unit is to protect the patient from
their own harmful instincts.

Another thing that makes suicide cases difficult is that, unlike a normal medical case, it is not
enough for the patient’s family to prove that the doctors or hospital was negligent; instead, you
often must prove the existence of gross negligence. If the hospital’s conduct was negligent, but
not grossly so, then the family cannot win the case. Fortunately, in this instance we were able to
show enough evidence of gross negligence that we were able to obtain a recovery for the
patient’s wife and family.