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A WRONGFUL DEATH
One Child's Fatal
Encounter With Public Health and Private Greed.
By Leon Bing.
Villard, $25
 

January 11, 1998
By MICHAEL E. ROSS

 

It's hard to know which of a complex of personal problems made Christy Scheck in such need of psychiatric care: her relentless anger at her parents, especially her father; an inability to resolve or fully express that anger; or the usual insecurities typical of teen-agers. ''A Wrongful Death'' charts how Christy's private nightmare was exploited by a health-care corporation whose attention to the bottom line took precedence over patient care. Leon Bing, the author of ''Do or Die'' and ''Smoked,'' documents the downward spiral of this bright, athletic San Diego girl's life -- from her admission to Southwood Psychiatric Center in November 1991 to her suicide in March 1992, at the age of 13. Bing reveals how Christy was victimized by overmedication, an ineffectual staff and a clinical culture that promoted financial gain over the welfare of the patient -- to the extent that the length of stay at Southwood was determined by the amount of a patient's insurance coverage. Bing isn't above snap assessments, too quickly guessing at an interviewee's motives, a practice as dangerous for journalists as for psychiatrists. One tires, too, of her transcriptlike style, a hard-boiled prose in which every click of an interview subject's teacup or clearing of a throat is faithfully recorded -- to little effect. But Bing has the instincts to let the agony of Christy's parents speak, eloquently, for itself. And she tellingly reaches past the Scheck family's tragedy into the broader problem that her death underscores: the existence of veritable psychosis mills.

 

 

 
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