Death of 14-year-old only tip of the iceberg of abuse
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "A Hidden Shame: Death and Danger in Georgia's Mental Hospitals": Alone in the darkness of a state mental hospital, Sarah Crider, 14, lay slowly dying. She complained of stomach pain at 4:30 p.m. She vomited about 8:30. When the only physician on call at Georgia Regional Hospital/Atlanta came at 9:20, Sarah had vomited again, but the doctor did not examine her, medical records suggest. She threw up around midnight and once more about 2 a.m., this time a bloody substance that resembled coffee grounds. But hospital workers did not enter Sarah's room again until 6:15 a.m. By then, it was too late. A few hours later, two hospital employees drove to Cobb County to tell Joyce Dobson, Sarah's grandmother. Dobson adored Sarah for all her complexities: artistic but troubled, challenging but comic. Now she could think only of two nights earlier, when she had last visited Sarah and heard another patient's haunting scream. I hope nobody killed her, Dobson blurted out. In fact, what happened to Sarah was beyond anything Dobson could have imagined. Read the rest.
3 comments:
I'm going to miss that.
I wonder what's up though regarding his position that it serves academics best to publish only in tradtional journals.
That's one of the most Dickensian things I've ever read.
Dickensian is perfect as a descriptor. And this story goes so well with the 12-year-old girl arrested for peeing in her pants. What did that arrest look like? Did they take her to the police station in a squad car? Did they fingerprint her?
With this story here, I can't get over that there was one night nurse for these 22 patients on the girl's floor, and that nurse had duties on other floors and in other buildings.
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