[1017] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
Re: Shin article in Globe: "Parents were last to know"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Steve G Malliaris)
Thu Jan 31 00:50:13 2002
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Message-ID: <5.0.2.1.2.20020130232654.021998e0@hesiod>
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2002 23:40:03 -0500
From: Steve G Malliaris <sgmallia@MIT.EDU>
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <1012446536.9641.3.camel@press-your-luck>
does anyone actually agree with this shit? i'm not trying to at all
marginalize the
tragedy of what happened, but it seems to me not only foolish but incredibly
irresponsible to try to pin the blame for something like this on
MIT. nobody holds
an employer as being responsible for every facet of an employee's personal life
or even in the most extreme case survival. why should an educational
institution
be any different. if, at 18, ms. shin had gone into the workforce instead
of going
to college, there would be no thought of an immense lawsuit against, say,
microsoft,
if an employee suicides.
in the end, responsibility lies directly with the individual and his or her
value systems,
and indirectly with the parents for their role in bringing those value
systems to existence.
and if those parents don't know her well enough to detect that something
might not be
right with her at college, how can they have the gall to sue some nameless
psychiatrist
and institute for that same shortcoming?!
if MIT sticks to its guns, which eventually it'll have to do if it wants to
stop doling out
half the cost of a new dormitory or lab building every time this happens
(ten times in the
past decade, five buildings?), then the shins will lose the lawsuit, lose
the exorbitant
amount of money they will have paid for lawyers, and everyone would be
worse off. then
they'll be short cash when it comes time to send their other two children
to college, and
maybe won't be able to afford the long distance phone calls to them that
might have had
a real chance of helping.
At 07:08 PM 1/30/02 -0800, you 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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