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• Thursday, February 8, 2007 04:55 PM

  Psychiatrists' duty to help

  I had a similar problem and was unable to get help from the psychiatrist.

  I live in a middle class town in Massachusetts. My daughter's best friend in kindergarten through second grade was from a broken family - mom and three daughters - who were living in one of the very few rental units in our middle class town. They were quite poor but so sweet. Their poverty made them needy and my wife and I helped them out a great deal. Because of this we grew quite close to the mother - a strong, smart, streetwise woman with an air of sadness around her. We loved her a great deal.

  Suddenly things started getting really strange. She tore into my driveway one summer afternoon and told me that she knew I was having my friends follow her and she wanted me to call them off. A few days later, I got a call from the police station asking me to come help them. She had barricaded herself in her car in the parking lot of the police station after "being followed" and she wanted help from the police, but she couldn't trust them because they wanted to get her, too... Things like this happened over the course of a couple of weeks.

  It came to a head when her daughter was at our home playing with our daughter and she came to pick her up - crazed, agitated and visibly high (she had had substance abuse problems in the past but was long since "clean"). My wife and I didn't want to let her daughter go with her and it turned into a huge argument that ended with her speeding off in her car with her daughter.

  I had given her rides a number of times over the previous years when she was carless. I knew that she saw a psychiatrist and I knew who he was, where his office was, etc. I also knew that she had been taking medication prescribed by him and she told me at some point during this crazy time that she had stopped taking it.

  So I tried desperately to involve the doctor who was shielded from the public by his secretary. "Your patient, so-and-so, is really having some problems. Can you please have the doctor contact this person... ask how she's doing?" I begged and pleaded and never got anywhere. I was told, emphatically, by his staff that he was ethically forbidden to reach out to her as a result of somebody calling him, concerned. I pushed the issue hard and I it was maddening that I couldn't get anywhere.

  Eventually a neighbor called the police on her for some public disturbance and she was hospitalized and examined and put back on her meds. She never completely recovered, in my opinion. We reached out to her but she was clearly embarrassed about her behavior from before and never responded to our overtures of friendship. Eventually she packed her daughters up and moved away.

  Having the doctor intervene might not have saved our friendship, but that's not important. Had he intervened perhaps she would have gotten better faster - or not descended as deeply into her manic funk. Perhaps her young daughters could have been spared any number of uncomfortable moments watching their mom fall apart in front of their eyes. Perhaps the neighbor would have never have had to call the police and the experience of being taken away in handcuffs would never have happened.

  I hope this letter writer's mother's daughter will respond.

  —Samlor Read Samlor's other letters
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