A Wrongful Death: One Child's Fatal Encounter with Public Health and Private Greed.

• Author: Slack, Charles

In March 1992, four month into her stay at Southwood Psychiatric Center in San Diego 13-year-old Christy Scheck tied sash of her terry cloth bathrobe around her neck and, while sucking on a Tootsie Pop, hung herself against her bathroom door.

Southwood, to which Christy's parents entrusted their daughter on the advice of a psychiatrist, proved to be a sort of malevolent Wonderland, full of criminally greedy administrators and inexperienced counselors whose ineptitude might have seemed comical had not the stakes for the Scheck family been so high -- and the outcome so tragic.

Journalist Leon Bing's book, A Wrongful Death: One Child's Encounter With Public Health and Private Greed, unsparingly recounts Southwood's deplorable handling of Christy Scheck's case and raises broader questions about the way mental illness is treated (or, too often, mistreated) in the United States. Southwood's parent company, National Medical Enterprises (NME), ran 76 hospitals around the country, and the problems were by no means limited to one hospital.

"Put heads in beds" was the charming directive from Southwood management to staff Parents who phoned advertised hotlines for advice on Susie's temper tantrums or Bobby's sullen moods were inevitably urged (assuming die family was well-insured) to bring the child in for an evaluation. Uninsured families were sloughed off on publicly funded programs or free clinics. The subjective nature of diagnosing mental illness -- as opposed to the cold reality of, say, a fractured fibula -- left ample room for slick counselors to convince parents their kids needed inpatient care. During a brief conference they could transform a simple act of teenage rebelliousness into a potentially deadly "disorder" requiring immediate hospitalization. Hospitalization typically lasted until the insurance ran out.

As often happens where matters of national policy are concerned, the niche for these white-coated sleaze bags grew from the best intentions. In this case, it was the long overdue recognition of mental illness as a medical -- and hence, insurable -- problem. While there are undoubtedly many fine, honest psychiatrists and hospitals out there, the river of insurance money was too tempting for miscreants to pass up. If persuasion didn't fill beds quickly enough, NME hospitals were not above more coercive tactics. The author rounds up horror stories of teens who were essentially kidnapped on some flimsy pretense (suspicion of a drug...