[1016] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Shin article in Globe: "Parents were last to know"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Wally)
Thu Jan 31 00:07:33 2002
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Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0201302252570.30934-100000@sub-zero.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 22:54:54 -0500
From: Wally <wally@SUB-ZERO.MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <1012446536.9641.3.camel@press-your-luck>
No article on the subject is complete, as I see it, without mentioning the
_astonishing_ sum of money for which the Shins are asking.
There are better ways to make a point than making a buck. Sorry to have to
say it, but the whole scene makes me a little fucking queasy.
W.
On Wed, 30 Jan 2002, Christopher Beland wrote:
> Parents were last to know
>
> By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist, 1/30/2002 [page B1]
>
> Maybe Elizabeth H. Shin was beyond saving. Maybe the MIT sophomore was
> as intent on secrecy as she was on suicide.
>
> ---
>
> But if the 19-year-old biology major was as determined to conceal her
> self-destructive impulses as MIT contends, why were they so well known
> on the campus? If hers was so hopeless a case of depression, why
> wouldn't Shin's therapists have sought a last-ditch alliance with the
> people who knew her best, her parents?
>
> The aspiring geneticist did not want her parents to know how
> despondent she was in the weeks before she set herself on fire in her
> dorm room on April 10, 2000. But isn't a doctor's first obligation to
> a patient's survival, not her confidentiality?
>
> Dr. Paul R. McHugh thinks so. ''Privacy isn't everything; life is
> everything,'' says the former chairman of the department of psychiatry
> at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was named last week to the
> President's Council on Bioethics. ''We lock people up, we take their
> civil liberties away if they are a danger to themselves. But we can't
> call the parents? What kind of nonsense is that?''
>
> Speaking generally because he is unfamiliar with the details of the
> Shin case, McHugh says he has trouble understanding why any therapist
> would not reach out to a suicidal teenager's parents. ''With a
> suicidal patient, privacy concerns go out the door. You tell her, `I
> need all the help I can get to save you. I insist on calling your
> parents. If you don't like it you can sue me.' At least, then she'd be
> alive to sue.''
>
> Shin, of course, is not alive to sue, so her parents have. In a
> wrongful death lawsuit filed this week, Cho Hyun and Kisuk Shin accuse
> the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of failing to provide the
> mental health care that might have saved the oldest of their three
> children. Like the Scott Krueger case before it, the death of Liz
> Shin could help redefine the relationship between institutions of
> higher learning and the parents who entrust children to their
> care. (Krueger, an MIT freshman, died of alcohol poisoning during an
> initiation rite at an unsupervised fraternity party. The university
> settled a lawsuit by his parents and apologized for the lax housing
> and disciplinary policies that contributed to their son's death.)
>
> In the Shin case, the standards of psychiatric practice are as much on
> trial as the negligence of the university. How could a student who
> expressed her suicidal intentions as loudly and as often as Shin did
> over the course of a year to faculty members, on-campus therapists,
> and her dorm mates have slipped through the cracks?
>
> Given the severity of the various diagnoses she received - some
> doctors suggested she had a serious borderline personality disorder -
> how could MIT psychiatrists not inform Shin's family of her
> deteriorating condition?
>
> It is disingenuous to argue, as MIT has, that the so-called Buckley
> Amendment, a federal law that safeguards the confidentiality of
> student records, prevented the university from alerting Shin's family
> to her psychiatric crisis. ''If she fell down the stairs and was
> unconscious, wouldn't they call her parents?'' David DeLuca, the
> attorney representing the Shins, sensibly asks.
>
> It is worse to suggest, as MIT also has, that it is not responsible
> because Shin may have come to Cambridge with the mental health issues
> that spiraled into suicide. ''Oh, please,'' says McHugh. ''Students
> come to school with lupus and asthma and the health services deal with
> it.''
>
> Dr. Margo Goldman of Wakefield, chairman of the confidentiality
> committee of the American Psychiatric Association, says it is
> important ''to start with the assumption that what a patient tells you
> is kept in confidence. But when a patient is in danger of harming
> herself, the therapist is obliged first to keep the patient safe.''
>
> Shin was the 10th of 12 suicides at MIT since 1990. You might have
> thought the university would have learned that lesson.
>
> Eileen McNamara can be reached by e-mail at mcnamara@globe.com.
>
>
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--
------------------------------------------------------------
Wally Holland MIT '01 mr_mole@mit.edu
MIT Comparative Media Studies (M.S. '03)
617/738.9049 http://web.mit.edu/mr_mole/www
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