Parents Thought They’d Found Haven for Teen

Cecilia Russell wasn’t safe in her Central Valley home. The drive to hurt herself -- to cut, burn, swallow pills -- was too strong. Nightly, the teenager’s parents locked up the kitchen knives. When a short-term care facility in Merced proved unable to monitor her, they gave up “Ceci” in order to save her.

State conservatorship was the best route to a locked facility that could watch the young woman around the clock. She entered Metropolitan State Hospital in March 2004.

Eighteen months later, at age 20, she was dead. A roommate found her hanging, just as Russell had found her previous roommate four months before.

The Norwalk facility houses some of the state’s most troubled mental patients. Intent on harming themselves, some swallow toothbrushes or turn towels and sheets into suicide tools.

Others lash out at fellow patients or staff or fabricate dramatic tales of abuse, making real abuses tough to prove.

Inappropriate -- at times coerced -- sex is not uncommon in a patient population in which many act out sexually.

“When you stick a bunch of mentally ill people together, things are going to happen,” said Joanna Gridley, a five-time Metropolitan patient who was released in October and found Russell, her friend, hanging by a sheet from a bedroom locker. “That hospital really does try. But there’s only so much they can do with what they have.”

Tragedies can occur in any mental hospital, no matter the precautions. But Metropolitan, state statistics, interviews and legal claims indicate, is less safe for patients and staff today than it was three years ago, when administrators began an overhaul of treatment policies meant to improve care.

Since 2002, the hospital has turned from stressing safety and security above all to an approach emphasizing patients’ rights, including a measure of privacy, autonomy and preparation for life outside the hospital.

It is not clear how much the new model of treatment has contributed to Metropolitan’s problems. What is clear is that the staff at times is stretched too thin, and, under the new approach, it relies less on restraints and medications to keep patients from harming themselves or others.

For some, the shift in philosophy has meant new hope and self-respect. Suzanne Serbin’s schizophrenic son, James, 35, has been at Metropolitan for 17 years, unresponsive to medication. Of late, she’s noticed an improvement in his mood. James mingles with other patients in exercise and music therapy classes now and is learning to interact with peers.

Before, “he would find himself a chair and go into a fetal position and sleep all day,” said Serbin, who chairs the hospital’s governor-appointed advisory board. “Now there seems to be a bit more life in the chap.”

Gridley, 28, also gives the new approach “every praise in the world” for teaching patients to manage their illnesses. But when patients gather for group treatment, she said, “there’s not enough staff to watch everyone. There’s fights. We’ve had girls claim that they were raped. I think in some cases the girls ... will say anything. But it does happen.”

Flying under the radar, one pending legal claim alleges, was a 13-year-old boy who sold sex to older kids in Metropolitan, undetected for months. The boy’s lawyer, Jack Anthony, on a court-appointed panel of lawyers who represent potentially mistreated Metropolitan youth, said staff members have acknowledged that the transactions occurred in bathrooms where supervision was lacking.

Metropolitan officials declined to comment on specific cases, citing confidentiality restrictions. But they said they can’t watch every patient all the time. By statute, patients can’t be monitored constantly unless they are determined to be dangerous to themselves or others.

But Cecilia’s mother, Linda Russell-Scheet, said that if her daughter had been watched more closely, she might still be alive.

A school district administrator, she adopted Russell when the girl was 5. Though she had an adventurous spirit as a little girl, she had suffered severe abuse. By adolescence, she was injuring herself. Russell-Scheet and her husband sent her to locked out-of-state facilities where at last she seemed to thrive, and she graduated from high school. Back in the Central Valley, however, pressures overwhelmed her.

Metropolitan was their best hope. But there, Russell soon bragged that she was learning new ways to hurt herself.

In May, Russell found the hanging body of Maria Garcia in the room they shared. She blamed herself for not arriving sooner, Gridley said. By summer, she had gotten hold of a cigarette lighter and burned her leg so severely she required a skin graft.

Then, one September evening, Gridley found Russell trying to burn herself again. Staff members checked on her, Gridley said, then left. The two young women talked for a while. When Gridley returned about half an hour later, it was too late.

“Both Maria and Ceci, their suicides were just a cry for attention, to say ‘Look at me, I need help,’ ” she said. “I don’t think they meant to kill themselves. I think they did it to get attention, but they weren’t found.”

After Russell’s death, Gridley said, the hospital began locking bedrooms during the dinner hour and stepping up rounds. “Metro is a good place,” Gridley said. “There may not be a whole lot of us, but there are people who Metro has helped.”

Russell-Scheet is unconvinced.

“You can have pockets of people doing wonderful things and still have a system that’s flawed....

“If you can’t make her well, I understand,” she said, sobbing, “but can you keep her safe?”