The tragic story of Gus Deeds, who attacked his father and then died by suicide after failing to receive adequate mental health care, highlights a critical systemic failure in the United States' approach to mental healthcare, particularly for individuals in crisis.
Mind Map
Click to expand
Click to explore the full interactive mind map • Zoom, pan, and navigate
Last November 19th, Virginia State
Senator Creed Deeds was slashed and
stabbed repeatedly by his own son. Gus
Deeds was 24 years old and had been
struggling with mental illness. He and
his father had been in an emergency room
just hours before the attack, but didn't
get the help that they needed. The story
of what went wrong with his medical care
exposes a problem in the way that
America handles mental health. It's a
failure that came to the four with the
murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School.
The vast majority of mental patients are
not violent, but this is a story about
the fraction who are a danger to
themselves or others. Parents of
mentally ill children in crisis often
find, as Senator Deeds did, that they
have nowhere to go. Creds bears the
scars of this failure on his face, his
body, and his soul.
I really don't want Gus to be defined by
his illness. I don't want Gus to be
defined by what happened on the 19th.
Gus was a was a great kid. He was a
perfect son. Um, you know, it's clear
the system failed. It's clear that that
that failed Gus. It killed Gus. We met
Crededs four weeks after the attack. He
was still distraught, but he told us his
story was a warning that could not wait.
What would have saved Gus? If he could
have been hospitalized that night, they
could have gotten him medicated and we I
could have worked to get Gus in some
sort of long-term care.
This is Gus Deeds when he was 20 years
old, a talented musician on the dean's
list at the College of William and Mary.
Gus, when he when he turned 20, I was
running for governor. he wanted to come
and and so he took this fall of 2009 off
to be with me. Um and and that was some
those are some of the best memories of
my life is having him with me there. But
after the campaign, for no reason anyone
could see, Gus Deed stopped taking care
of himself and became paranoid,
obsessive, antisocial. He dropped out
and couldn't keep a job. In 2011, he was
diagnosed as bipolar. His father was so
worried that Gus would kill himself.
Deeds told us he got rid of all of the
guns in their rural farmhouse except one
hunting rifle that had no ammunition.
Later, with medication, Gus returned to
William and Mary until last fall. Gus
had posted weird things on his Facebook
page about
um you know how the professors were
ganging up against him and um he was
going to start boycotting class. It was
pretty clear to me that he wasn't taking
medicine. I told Gus that he and I
needed to talk to somebody um together.
That's when Deeds discovered that
talking to somebody, getting treatment
is harder in mental health than any
other kind of medicine. In the decades
after the 1960s, most large mental
institutions were closed. It was thought
that patients would get better treatment
back in their communities, but adequate
local facilities were never built. The
number of beds available to psychiatric
patients in America dropped from more
than half a million to fewer than
100,000. That leaves many kids in crisis
today with one option, the emergency room.
room.
You know, every day we have 10 to 20
kids with psychiatric problems come into
our emergency department. Kids who want
to kill themselves, who've tried to kill
themselves, who've tried to kill
somebody else. Brian Geyser is a nurse
practitioner we met in the emergency
department of Yale New Haven Hospital in
Connecticut. It's one of the best in the
nation in psychiatry. Well, we have 52
psychiatric beds here at Yale and right
now all 52 are Fulton. And so the seven
kids that are here in the emergency room
are waiting uh for an open bed. How long
will they wait? Uh five of them have
been here three days already. Most every
day the beds are full of patients in
crisis. 17-year-old Tyler Writington was
waiting in the ER. He had just slashed
his face with a knife. You hear voices?
Yes. A new voice came about a year ago
and he well I call it a he cuz it was
more of a deeper voice but he ended up
telling me to hurt myself and making me
find ways to hurt myself. Do the voices
ever tell you to hurt someone else? only
once and that was at school in May and
that was when I got admitted into the
hospital cuz I was actually considering
hurting the people around me and I was I
was like this ain't me. This is not what
I want to do. Tyler's dad, Ernie
Writington, had called a psychiatrist
that week but couldn't get an
appointment for 3 months. There's a
national shortage of psychiatrists. Why
is there not another option for you?
This has always been our only option.
The emergency room. The emergency room.
Yeah. Because that we know that when we
they take the time to take care of him.
They watch him. Make sure he's okay. But
okay usually means okay for the moment.
Typically, insurance companies pay for
this care only as long as the patients
are quote at imminent risk of harming
themselves or others. Some insurance
companies will give us a couple of days,
a few days before they ask us to call
them back to get reauthorization for the
admission. Some of them are every single
day that we have to call. And so,
usually, you know, we're talking about,
you know, 3 to four days and the
insurance companies are saying, "All
right, you know, it's time. Let's get
this kid out." because they're not going
to kill themselves or someone else right
now. Right now. Yeah. Many patients need
care for months or years, but there are
few facilities of that kind. They're
expensive and often insurance won't
cover them. So, kids in crisis spend in
We need to be able to set up a system
where we follow these kids into the
community. We follow the families. We
make sure that they have a safety net
and somebody's watching them and
monitoring them because, you know, it
could be next month, it could be 6
months from now and the child will do
something again. But if they're not
hooked into a system that's watching
them, taking care of them, then we could
have problems on our hands. How many of
you have had to take your child to the emergency
emergency
room? Everybody. And how many times? I
can't count. I couldn't I couldn't
count. Seven Connecticut mothers,
including Mary Joe Andrews, Meg Clancy,
and D. Orsy, told us about their ER
crisis and battles over insurance. My
daughter, after spending, she was eight
at the time, spending 12 days in the
hospital, they told me she was ready to
come home. By Friday morning, we were in
the psychiatrist's office for her
follow-up appointment. She was seeing
blood dripping from the
walls. There was statues telling her to
kill me and she was ready for discharge
3 days earlier. We had one with an
insurance company. They wanted to
discharge my daughter. She needed to
stay where she was safe and the
insurance company would not pay for her
to stay. And so I was told by our social
worker in the hospital that if I gave my
daughter up to Department of Children
and Families that then she would have
insurance coverage through the state and
she would be allowed to stay. Wait a
minute. Give Give Give her up. Give her
up to the state. Correct.
Give her up to the state. And you said
what? Absolutely not.
They formed this support group because
so few people understand their troubles.
For example, they share the names of
contractors to repair walls or remove
doors. Their children punch holes in the
drywall and can't be allowed to lock
themselves in a room. What is the
difference between being the mother of a
child who has mental illness and the
mother of a child who might have heart
disease or cancer? Sympathy.
Being in Connecticut, they watched the
tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary with
more insight than most. Referring to the
killer's mother, one of them told us,
"If Nancy Lanza had a health care plan
for her son, she couldn't have made it
work. There's really no place after the
hospital." So, the kids end up coming
back home right where the situation
started. And you know, the psychiatrists
in the hospital will say, "You're right.
The the system's broken." And I I
remember at one discharge, I refused to
sign the discharge paper because I
wasn't going to agree
that it was appropriate. They discharged
your child anyway. Oh, yes. Yes. That is
essentially what happened to Creed Deeds
in Virginia last November. But his
effort was further complicated by the
fact that his son Gus was an adult over
18 and Gus didn't want treatment. Deeds
had to get a court order and sheriff's
deputies to take Gus to the ER. A state
law designed to protect patients rights
meant that the court order would expire
in only 6 hours. That's all they had to
find a hospital that would admit him.
Whole afternoon, Gus didn't sit down. He
paced for. He'd look at me. He'd smile.
And I just had this sinking feeling that
he wasn't going to be hospitalized. And
if you didn't find a hospital bed in six
hours, Gus was coming home. He was
coming home. And and and and I was
concerned that if he came home, there
was there was going to be a crisis. A
representative of the county agency that
manages mental health care told Deeds
that he couldn't find a hospital with a
psychiatric bed appropriate for Gus's
case. You're concerned that your son is
suicidal. The clock has run out on the
emergency room and he comes in and says,
"Sorry, you got to leave." That he said
that Gus wasn't suicidal. I guess he
made that based on his evaluation. His
evaluation that Gus wasn't suicidal.
What did you say to him in in leaving
the emergency room? I I said the system
failed my son tonight. There was no
place to go but home. And he sat at one
end of the dining room table. I sat at
the other end. I ate my food and he just
was writing furiously in this journal he
kept not much
conversation and I said good night bud.
I didn't know what was going to happen.
Um, but the next morning, you know, I I
felt like there'd be a confrontation,
but I didn't I had no reason to think
there'd be violence. And but but you
know, I I I got ready for work and I
went out to the barn to feed the horses
and um Gus was coming across the yard
and he was I said, "Hey, bud. How'd you
sleep?" He said, "Fine." I turned my
back and you know I turned my back had
this speed thing in my hands and and he
was um just on me. He attacked you twi
he he he got me twice you know stabbed
me twice with a knife? The state police
told me they found a knife and I I
turned around I said bud what's going
on. I said and he just kept coming at
me. I said I love you so much. I said
don't make this any worse than it is. He
just kept coming at me and he just kept I
I
mean, you know, and I I was I was I was
bleeding a good
bit, but you know, he turned around and
he started walking toward the house.
Deeds staggered away. A neighbor found
him. A helicopter ambulance was called
when I was in the rescue squad or the
helicopter somewhere. I'd heard about
some, you know, some call came over the
scanner that there had been somebody
with a gunshot wound to the head. The
gunshot victim was Gus. Oh, yeah. Gus
had killed himself. He had found or
bought ammunition for that last rifle,
the unloaded rifle that Deeds had kept
in the house. You were describing the
last night in which he was writing
feverishly in this notebook before you
said good night. Did you go back and
look at that? I did. What was he
writing? He had determined that I I had
to die. That I was an evil man. Um that
he was going to execute me and then he
was going to go straight to heaven.
Creds has now returned to the Virginia
Senate. He's introduced bills to, among
other things, extend emergency custody
in an ER from 6 to 24 hours and to
create a computer database to list all
the open psychiatric beds statewide.
There's just a a a lack of equity in the
way we as a society and certainly as a
government and insur insurance insurance
industry, medical industry with the way
we look at mental health issues. Don't
want to fund it, don't want to talk
about it, don't want to see it. That's
that that's exactly right. But but the
reality is it's everywhere. You've told
us in this interview again and again
that you don't want Gus to be defined by
what happened in those few seconds,
right? I want people to remember the the
brilliant, friendly,
um, loving kid that was Gus deeds will
use Gus, I hope, to address mental
health and to make sure that other
people don't have to suffer through
this. The state of Virginia is
investigating why there was no hospital
bed for Gus deeds that night.
Nationwide, since 2008, states have cut
4 and a half billion dollars from mental
How are you? Nice to meet you. Right.
How many pumps did we say? Two. Two. Right.
Right.
We want to be impartial. Like we don't
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
