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<p>Well, that will have a chilling effect if it were to happen.
Different scenario.
An employer hires an adult who they know has a history of mental illness.<br>
They pay the person for the job and therefore have helped finance the person’s unsupervised lifestyle.
That person winds up killing people.
Wouldn’t they have the same negligent liability as you stated for this case?</p>
<p>Doesn’t matter if the person was your offspring or an employee since they are an adult.</p>
<p>In CA, parents can already be held liable under both common and statutory law for willful injuries or death caused by their minor children. This would be an extension of the same principle. </p>
<p>It is just an idea. Not sure why the initial reaction is to shut it down.</p>
<p>Under what circumstances and for how long would you hold parents responsible Bay? </p>
<p>I just don’t see how parents can be taken to task legally for negligence with regard to “supervision” of an ADULT offspring. It would be different if he were a minor. </p>
<p>And if we were to make them liable for the actions of their adult children, then it doesn’t jive with how parents of kids who are over 18 have little access to things like their records, health care personnel and so forth. Can’t have it both ways.</p>
<p>@Bay that is actually a very overbroad principle, even applied to minors, and when it is adults the only rationale for it is gone. </p>
<p>It would take a joint effort with the MH professional community to come up with the proper protocol, but the parents ought to be included in it, because they are the parents, and if they don’t care about whether their offspring kill themselves or others, then they ought to be forced to care. That is how I feel.</p>
<p>CV, I don’t know why you consider it an overbroad principle. I assume that the rationale for current law is because minor children are incapable of making rational decisions regarding their actions that might injure or kill others. I see this as a rationale applicable to the mentally ill. What are you seeing?</p>
<p>I hope I am not around when that happens! My kids ALREADY don’t want to have kids, and all they know is a fairly routine set of responsibilities, by CC standards . !</p>
<p>For kids with developmental delay, if they become clients of regional center before age 18, the state, I believe through some federal funding, helps take care of them. Parents often keep their adult children at home, at least until they can’t manage their behavior physically anymore, and sometimes they become conservators, and manage their disability checks. . It is not easy to become a client of regional center where I live, and I don’t think any of the CC folk that self identify as “on the spectrum” would qualify. That is as close as I can come up with in terms of a “protocol”. </p>
<p>I have a few patients who are developmentally delayed, AND have mental health symptoms, and their parents are DD too! What would happen in THAT scenario? Right now regional center provides someone to come with mother to her son’s appointments. </p>
<p>Sigh. This is so complicated and so severely messed up in so many ways. Even mentally ill is not straightforward, anymore. If we are going to insist on calling depression a mental illness or even Aspergers, Anorexia, and a slew of other disorders that are not anywhere near psychotic and evil and extremely unlikely to result in a killing spree we have some redefining to do and getting agreement is probably not going to happen. Also, someone has to decide who gets rights and who doesn’t. He was seeing a psychiatrist to the stars who is best known for getting Paris Hilton out of jail due to unbearable emotional trauma and teaching Charlie Sheen to say “winning”. Maybe it’s just me, but I see this as a problem.</p>
<p>@Bay it is not an unqualified principle by any means. It is occasionally applied in some circumstances, even with minors. And it doesn’t apply to adults because they are adults. The only justification for its occasional application to children is that they are not adults. Akin to a parent being responsible for bills run up to care for a child.</p>
<p>CV,
Ok, but you are still not telling me why it couldn’t be made applicable to parents who know that their children are mentally ill/suicidal and cannot live independently (even the neighbors knew this, in ER’s case).</p>
<p>Yes, it would be another infringement on our freedoms. I’m not even saying I would want this myself, even though I’d be fine doing jail time if my mentally ill child killed someone with a gun I enabled him to have.</p>
<p>Are we looking for solutions? If not, then let my idea die in the minds of those who are not. It makes sense to me to keep the parents involved. No one else cares (or should care) as much to make sure these people are okay.</p>
<p>I think like families of kids with DD’s, getting families mental health resources would make more sense, and so would respite. </p>
<p>Of course, GOOD and intensive mental health help is a limited resource, so it would have to be rationed. That means the most severe and remediable problems get the mental health services supported by taxes and medical benefits. That is how it works when it comes to county services. I don’t think there is a problem with involving parents, and I won’t take a severely ill adult patient who does not have family involved. But it is also important to realize that the most impaired patients often come from the most impaired families.</p>
<p>And maybe one day we will be able to do an amniocentesis, and know who will likely be killers, and parents can make a choice about how to proceed. 
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<p>I asked awhile back and am still wondering what others think about the people in Elliot’s life who had heard him discuss his “philosophy” and fantasies. For example, his friend James. In the article linked a page or so ago, James’ mother tells a reporter that ER was a very emotionally disturbed boy and that they didn’t want James with him. In ER’s manifesto, he speaks of sharing his fantasies with James and his frustration at James’ more casual attitude toward his virginity, etc. How many others knew of ER’s obsessions and his anger? Did ER talk to his parents about his anger toward women? Were there more concrete red flags than just his withdrawal and his depression/anxiety? How specific was he when he confided in someone? In his Manifesto, he describes a conversation with another friend who tells him not to do anything “rash”. What led to that comment? </p>
<p>How much responsibility do these people bear if ER was open with them about his anger and his idea of an ideal world where women were kept in concentration camps?</p>
<p>People keep talking about him as if he kept all of this to himself. As if nobody could know what he was thinking. But I think that people DID know some of it. Did they share it? And if not, why not? If he was a ticking time bomb, he wasn’t ticking that quietly, IMO.</p>
<p>I am sure many of us remember the tragic story of Elizabeth Shin at MIT.<a href=“Who Was Responsible For Elizabeth Shin? - The New York Times”>http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/28/magazine/28MIT.html</a> Healthcare privacy laws have tightened,especially since the advent of HIPAA, and parents can’t be told information without the patient’s permission, except under certain specific circumstances.</p>
<p>No longer can we call a hospital to see what room a friend is in or if they have been discharged. In facilities where i worked, patients were given an individual code/number on admission, and if a family member did not know it, (it was usually provided to them by the patient) no information could be disclosed- not even if the person was there or not. This could become an issue if a spouse had been seriously threatened by her husband, and was hospitalized, but the spouse couldnt always find out if/when he had been released and if she was safe (even if she had a restraining order). Yes, it can be ridiculous- all in the name of privacy.</p>
<p>Another elephant in the living room is… insurance. Even with mental health parity laws, in many cases a patient’s mental health benefits are managed by a third party, and if the patient does not meet THAT insurerrs definition of acutely dangerous or does not meet their criteria for level of acuity necessary for a continued inpatient stay, even if the treating staff feels the patient needs to stay in the hospital, the insurance case manager may not authorize continued covered days. What then? Keep the patient in the hospital (as they should) and appeal the denial of covered days, which may or may not be successful down the road, or potentially have the patient on the hook for an uncovered part of the hospital stay? Not everyone has the benefit of wealth as did ER.</p>
<p>Yes, it is a very broken system. But it is not the parents fault when these things occur, nor should they be on the hook , like college (parents often pay but get little or no information) , Bay.</p>
<p>@Bay I don’t know what to say about why it couldn’t be made to apply. I think it would be an incredibly short sighted approach and it would violate basic concepts of responsibility and independence. If there were a shorter process for more limited impact than guardianship for parents paying their adult kids support, that would allow them access to specific things like health records etc, that might be a way to go. But I would be adamantly opposed to what you are suggesting, and I am not hearing anyone else here liking the idea. So I guess the reason it couldn’t be made to apply is that enough people wouldn’t agree with you to change the law that way.</p>
<p>I proposed my own solution. It is not refined and another one might be better, but really being opposed to one doesn’t mean not looking for solutions.</p>
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<p>Agree here. One cannot lightly propose, much less pass laws which may not only deprive adult citizens of their liberties and rights without good cause after due process. While balancing the rights of society and individuals can sometimes be exceedingly difficult, one must tread very carefully or else risk creating laws which may have unintended side effects and ripe for abuse from higher authorities and those doing the reporting. </p>
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<p>As an aside, this aspect…with the exception of switching genders has been proposed by an ostensibly non-mentally ill early feminist scholar Mary Daly in an interview. </p>
<p>She proposed limiting the male population to 10% of the total human population and women should have ultimate control over them in those camps for reproductive purposes. </p>
<p>I’m planning to be the first responder if and when any of my children, regardless of age, has a mental crisis. I’m hoping other parents will do the same. Apparently, that is all I can do.</p>
<p>@cobrat, that’s hilarious. I wonder if ER saw that somewhere, or saw the male dominated parody of it, and took it seriously? I’m assuming the feminist was making a point, not signing up subscribers or anything…</p>
<p>Seriously, Cobrat. While the reported beliefs of a late Boston College feminist professor are oddly amusing, they really don’t have a bearing on this case, other than the tangential issue about opinions re: the opposite sex. </p>
<p>Thank you Bay. I am sure that will be awesome. I hope I will be too. I hope I will not be the enemy. </p>
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<p>If you want an adult to take on responsibility for another adult, parent or not, than that person should have the option to take on that responsibility and have full control or chose to have that adult involuntarily committed. </p>