The last conversation Kim Young had with her 38-year-old son Eddie was full of hope for the future.
Burnaby hospital staff had handed him a mobile at his bed, and Young had told him over the phone that she had found a place for him to live.
“I said, ‘Everything’s going to be great. As soon as you get out, everything’s going to be wonderful,’” Young told the NOW. “‘OK, mom. I love you,’ is what he said to me.”
Within hours, her only child, who had long struggled with anxiety, depression and drug problems, was released from hospital, headed straight to a bridge near the Commercial-Broadway SkyTrain Station and jumped to his death.
“Without even a second thought, he just stood up and jumped,” said Young, who said she has spoken with a bystander who witnessed Eddie’s final moments. “He knew what he was going to do from out of the hospital, went straight to the bridge and jumped, not even a look back, not even a second thought about it, just climbed up there and jumped, and it’s just breaking my heart, breaking my heart.”
Young blames Burnaby Hospital for her son’s death, saying staff shouldn’t have released him without notifying her.
She had brought him there three days earlier, after he had shown up at her house dishevelled and incoherent.
He told her he had been beaten and drugged, Young said.
Despite struggles he’d had with methamphetamine, she said she’d believed him because of bruises and a needle mark on his arm.
“He was not an intravenous drug user,” she said.
While Eddie was in the hospital, Young pleaded with staff to contact her before releasing him, but that didn’t happen.
She said the hospital knew about his suicidal thoughts because police had brought him there before after he had threatened suicide.
“I gave them the suicide note that he had written, that I had found, so they knew he was suicidal, they knew of his mental illness, they knew of his anxiety attacks, they knew about the drugs he had done. They knew everything, and they let him out of the hospital,” she said.
At a vigil at Burnaby Hospital in Eddie’s honour Monday, Young called for changes to how hospitals release people with mental illness.
“I want it to be mandatory that if a mentally ill patient, especially one threatening to commit suicide, should be released from a hospital, that they at least contact a family member or an advocate or something like that,” she told the NOW. “I don’t want this to happen to any mother again or to any child.”
The Fraser Health Authority, however, has said its policy is to ask patients being discharged if they want hospital staff to notify loved ones.
“As with all discharge planning, we worked with the patient in determining housing needs, transportation requirements, connect to social services, community health services and also contacting family members. In this case, with followed the patient’s wishes in all of those areas,” chief medical officer Dr. Victoria Lee told media.
The health authority has said it is reviewing Eddie’s case and the results of the review will be shared with the family.
