0:02 Last November 19th, Virginia State
0:05 Senator Creed Deeds was slashed and
0:08 stabbed repeatedly by his own son. Gus
0:10 Deeds was 24 years old and had been
0:13 struggling with mental illness. He and
0:15 his father had been in an emergency room
0:18 just hours before the attack, but didn't
0:20 get the help that they needed. The story
0:23 of what went wrong with his medical care
0:25 exposes a problem in the way that
0:27 America handles mental health. It's a
0:29 failure that came to the four with the
0:32 murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
0:34 The vast majority of mental patients are
0:37 not violent, but this is a story about
0:39 the fraction who are a danger to
0:42 themselves or others. Parents of
0:44 mentally ill children in crisis often
0:47 find, as Senator Deeds did, that they
0:50 have nowhere to go. Creds bears the
0:53 scars of this failure on his face, his
0:56 body, and his soul.
1:06 I really don't want Gus to be defined by
1:08 his illness. I don't want Gus to be
1:10 defined by what happened on the 19th.
1:12 Gus was a was a great kid. He was a
1:15 perfect son. Um, you know, it's clear
1:17 the system failed. It's clear that that
1:20 that failed Gus. It killed Gus. We met
1:23 Crededs four weeks after the attack. He
1:26 was still distraught, but he told us his
1:29 story was a warning that could not wait.
1:30 What would have saved Gus? If he could
1:33 have been hospitalized that night, they
1:35 could have gotten him medicated and we I
1:36 could have worked to get Gus in some
1:40 sort of long-term care.
1:42 This is Gus Deeds when he was 20 years
1:45 old, a talented musician on the dean's
1:47 list at the College of William and Mary.
1:50 Gus, when he when he turned 20, I was
1:52 running for governor. he wanted to come
1:55 and and so he took this fall of 2009 off
1:58 to be with me. Um and and that was some
2:00 those are some of the best memories of
2:02 my life is having him with me there. But
2:05 after the campaign, for no reason anyone
2:08 could see, Gus Deed stopped taking care
2:10 of himself and became paranoid,
2:12 obsessive, antisocial. He dropped out
2:16 and couldn't keep a job. In 2011, he was
2:19 diagnosed as bipolar. His father was so
2:21 worried that Gus would kill himself.
2:24 Deeds told us he got rid of all of the
2:27 guns in their rural farmhouse except one
2:30 hunting rifle that had no ammunition.
2:33 Later, with medication, Gus returned to
2:36 William and Mary until last fall. Gus
2:38 had posted weird things on his Facebook
2:40 page about
2:42 um you know how the professors were
2:45 ganging up against him and um he was
2:47 going to start boycotting class. It was
2:49 pretty clear to me that he wasn't taking
2:51 medicine. I told Gus that he and I
2:55 needed to talk to somebody um together.
2:57 That's when Deeds discovered that
2:59 talking to somebody, getting treatment
3:01 is harder in mental health than any
3:04 other kind of medicine. In the decades
3:07 after the 1960s, most large mental
3:10 institutions were closed. It was thought
3:12 that patients would get better treatment
3:14 back in their communities, but adequate
3:17 local facilities were never built. The
3:20 number of beds available to psychiatric
3:22 patients in America dropped from more
3:25 than half a million to fewer than
3:28 100,000. That leaves many kids in crisis
3:31 today with one option, the emergency room.
3:33 room.
3:35 You know, every day we have 10 to 20
3:37 kids with psychiatric problems come into
3:39 our emergency department. Kids who want
3:41 to kill themselves, who've tried to kill
3:42 themselves, who've tried to kill
3:44 somebody else. Brian Geyser is a nurse
3:46 practitioner we met in the emergency
3:49 department of Yale New Haven Hospital in
3:51 Connecticut. It's one of the best in the
3:54 nation in psychiatry. Well, we have 52
3:57 psychiatric beds here at Yale and right
4:01 now all 52 are Fulton. And so the seven
4:04 kids that are here in the emergency room
4:07 are waiting uh for an open bed. How long
4:09 will they wait? Uh five of them have
4:12 been here three days already. Most every
4:15 day the beds are full of patients in
4:18 crisis. 17-year-old Tyler Writington was
4:20 waiting in the ER. He had just slashed
4:23 his face with a knife. You hear voices?
4:27 Yes. A new voice came about a year ago
4:30 and he well I call it a he cuz it was
4:35 more of a deeper voice but he ended up
4:37 telling me to hurt myself and making me
4:39 find ways to hurt myself. Do the voices
4:42 ever tell you to hurt someone else? only
4:45 once and that was at school in May and
4:47 that was when I got admitted into the
4:49 hospital cuz I was actually considering
4:52 hurting the people around me and I was I
4:56 was like this ain't me. This is not what
4:58 I want to do. Tyler's dad, Ernie
5:00 Writington, had called a psychiatrist
5:02 that week but couldn't get an
5:05 appointment for 3 months. There's a
5:08 national shortage of psychiatrists. Why
5:10 is there not another option for you?
5:12 This has always been our only option.
5:14 The emergency room. The emergency room.
5:15 Yeah. Because that we know that when we
5:24 they take the time to take care of him.
5:27 They watch him. Make sure he's okay. But
5:31 okay usually means okay for the moment.
5:33 Typically, insurance companies pay for
5:35 this care only as long as the patients
5:38 are quote at imminent risk of harming
5:41 themselves or others. Some insurance
5:42 companies will give us a couple of days,
5:44 a few days before they ask us to call
5:46 them back to get reauthorization for the
5:49 admission. Some of them are every single
5:51 day that we have to call. And so,
5:53 usually, you know, we're talking about,
5:54 you know, 3 to four days and the
5:56 insurance companies are saying, "All
5:57 right, you know, it's time. Let's get
5:59 this kid out." because they're not going
6:02 to kill themselves or someone else right
6:05 now. Right now. Yeah. Many patients need
6:08 care for months or years, but there are
6:10 few facilities of that kind. They're
6:12 expensive and often insurance won't
6:15 cover them. So, kids in crisis spend in
6:23 We need to be able to set up a system
6:24 where we follow these kids into the
6:26 community. We follow the families. We
6:28 make sure that they have a safety net
6:29 and somebody's watching them and
6:31 monitoring them because, you know, it
6:33 could be next month, it could be 6
6:35 months from now and the child will do
6:37 something again. But if they're not
6:38 hooked into a system that's watching
6:40 them, taking care of them, then we could
6:42 have problems on our hands. How many of
6:44 you have had to take your child to the emergency
6:45 emergency
6:48 room? Everybody. And how many times? I
6:50 can't count. I couldn't I couldn't
6:52 count. Seven Connecticut mothers,
6:55 including Mary Joe Andrews, Meg Clancy,
6:58 and D. Orsy, told us about their ER
7:01 crisis and battles over insurance. My
7:04 daughter, after spending, she was eight
7:08 at the time, spending 12 days in the
7:10 hospital, they told me she was ready to
7:13 come home. By Friday morning, we were in
7:16 the psychiatrist's office for her
7:19 follow-up appointment. She was seeing
7:21 blood dripping from the
7:24 walls. There was statues telling her to
7:27 kill me and she was ready for discharge
7:29 3 days earlier. We had one with an
7:31 insurance company. They wanted to
7:33 discharge my daughter. She needed to
7:36 stay where she was safe and the
7:38 insurance company would not pay for her
7:40 to stay. And so I was told by our social
7:44 worker in the hospital that if I gave my
7:47 daughter up to Department of Children
7:50 and Families that then she would have
7:52 insurance coverage through the state and
7:53 she would be allowed to stay. Wait a
7:56 minute. Give Give Give her up. Give her
7:59 up to the state. Correct.
8:01 Give her up to the state. And you said
8:04 what? Absolutely not.
8:06 They formed this support group because
8:09 so few people understand their troubles.
8:11 For example, they share the names of
8:14 contractors to repair walls or remove
8:17 doors. Their children punch holes in the
8:19 drywall and can't be allowed to lock
8:22 themselves in a room. What is the
8:24 difference between being the mother of a
8:28 child who has mental illness and the
8:30 mother of a child who might have heart
8:34 disease or cancer? Sympathy.
8:36 Being in Connecticut, they watched the
8:38 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary with
8:41 more insight than most. Referring to the
8:43 killer's mother, one of them told us,
8:45 "If Nancy Lanza had a health care plan
8:48 for her son, she couldn't have made it
8:51 work. There's really no place after the
8:53 hospital." So, the kids end up coming
8:57 back home right where the situation
8:59 started. And you know, the psychiatrists
9:02 in the hospital will say, "You're right.
9:05 The the system's broken." And I I
9:07 remember at one discharge, I refused to
9:10 sign the discharge paper because I
9:12 wasn't going to agree
9:15 that it was appropriate. They discharged
9:19 your child anyway. Oh, yes. Yes. That is
9:21 essentially what happened to Creed Deeds
9:23 in Virginia last November. But his
9:25 effort was further complicated by the
9:28 fact that his son Gus was an adult over
9:32 18 and Gus didn't want treatment. Deeds
9:34 had to get a court order and sheriff's
9:37 deputies to take Gus to the ER. A state
9:40 law designed to protect patients rights
9:43 meant that the court order would expire
9:46 in only 6 hours. That's all they had to
9:49 find a hospital that would admit him.
9:52 Whole afternoon, Gus didn't sit down. He
9:54 paced for. He'd look at me. He'd smile.
9:56 And I just had this sinking feeling that
9:58 he wasn't going to be hospitalized. And
10:00 if you didn't find a hospital bed in six
10:02 hours, Gus was coming home. He was
10:05 coming home. And and and and I was
10:07 concerned that if he came home, there
10:09 was there was going to be a crisis. A
10:11 representative of the county agency that
10:13 manages mental health care told Deeds
10:15 that he couldn't find a hospital with a
10:18 psychiatric bed appropriate for Gus's
10:20 case. You're concerned that your son is
10:22 suicidal. The clock has run out on the
10:24 emergency room and he comes in and says,
10:26 "Sorry, you got to leave." That he said
10:28 that Gus wasn't suicidal. I guess he
10:30 made that based on his evaluation. His
10:32 evaluation that Gus wasn't suicidal.
10:34 What did you say to him in in leaving
10:36 the emergency room? I I said the system
10:39 failed my son tonight. There was no
10:43 place to go but home. And he sat at one
10:45 end of the dining room table. I sat at
10:48 the other end. I ate my food and he just
10:52 was writing furiously in this journal he
10:54 kept not much
10:58 conversation and I said good night bud.
11:01 I didn't know what was going to happen.
11:04 Um, but the next morning, you know, I I
11:06 felt like there'd be a confrontation,
11:07 but I didn't I had no reason to think
11:10 there'd be violence. And but but you
11:13 know, I I I got ready for work and I
11:15 went out to the barn to feed the horses
11:18 and um Gus was coming across the yard
11:20 and he was I said, "Hey, bud. How'd you
11:22 sleep?" He said, "Fine." I turned my
11:26 back and you know I turned my back had
11:28 this speed thing in my hands and and he
11:32 was um just on me. He attacked you twi
11:35 he he he got me twice you know stabbed
11:37 me twice with a knife? The state police
11:39 told me they found a knife and I I
11:41 turned around I said bud what's going
11:43 on. I said and he just kept coming at
11:46 me. I said I love you so much. I said
11:48 don't make this any worse than it is. He
11:50 just kept coming at me and he just kept I
11:51 I
11:55 mean, you know, and I I was I was I was
11:57 bleeding a good
11:59 bit, but you know, he turned around and
12:01 he started walking toward the house.
12:04 Deeds staggered away. A neighbor found
12:07 him. A helicopter ambulance was called
12:10 when I was in the rescue squad or the
12:12 helicopter somewhere. I'd heard about
12:14 some, you know, some call came over the
12:16 scanner that there had been somebody
12:19 with a gunshot wound to the head. The
12:23 gunshot victim was Gus. Oh, yeah. Gus
12:25 had killed himself. He had found or
12:28 bought ammunition for that last rifle,
12:30 the unloaded rifle that Deeds had kept
12:33 in the house. You were describing the
12:35 last night in which he was writing
12:37 feverishly in this notebook before you
12:40 said good night. Did you go back and
12:41 look at that? I did. What was he
12:44 writing? He had determined that I I had
12:47 to die. That I was an evil man. Um that
12:48 he was going to execute me and then he
12:52 was going to go straight to heaven.
12:54 Creds has now returned to the Virginia
12:57 Senate. He's introduced bills to, among
13:00 other things, extend emergency custody
13:04 in an ER from 6 to 24 hours and to
13:07 create a computer database to list all
13:10 the open psychiatric beds statewide.
13:13 There's just a a a lack of equity in the
13:16 way we as a society and certainly as a
13:18 government and insur insurance insurance
13:20 industry, medical industry with the way
13:22 we look at mental health issues. Don't
13:23 want to fund it, don't want to talk
13:25 about it, don't want to see it. That's
13:27 that that's exactly right. But but the
13:29 reality is it's everywhere. You've told
13:32 us in this interview again and again
13:34 that you don't want Gus to be defined by
13:36 what happened in those few seconds,
13:39 right? I want people to remember the the
13:41 brilliant, friendly,
13:46 um, loving kid that was Gus deeds will
13:48 use Gus, I hope, to address mental
13:49 health and to make sure that other
13:50 people don't have to suffer through
13:53 this. The state of Virginia is
13:56 investigating why there was no hospital
13:58 bed for Gus deeds that night.
14:02 Nationwide, since 2008, states have cut
14:05 4 and a half billion dollars from mental
14:14 How are you? Nice to meet you. Right.
14:17 How many pumps did we say? Two. Two. Right.
14:19 Right.
14:20 We want to be impartial. Like we don't
