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Monday, August 19, 2002
'I'm afraid for him and anybody around him'
Copyright © 2002 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc. | ||||||||||
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Also on this page: CASTAWAY CHILDREN: Maine's Most Vulnerable Kids | |||||||||
Diana Boivin stood guard in her home. Her son Brian struggles with bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity and conduct disorder along with psychotic episodes. Psychiatrists have also speculated that Brian may suffer from a personality disorder. The illnesses cause him to be moody, depressed and unpredictable. His personality changes rapidly. One moment, he can be giddy, talkative, profoundly happy. The next, he can be intensely sad, angry, irritated. Since he was 5, Brian has erupted into violent tirades. Now 17, he stands nearly 6 feet tall and weighs 280 pounds. Doctors placed Brian on powerful psychotropic drugs that helped stabilize his moods, but the medications often have to be changed or the dosages adjusted. When he became a teen-ager, he'd shove his mother, pick up knives and glasses, threaten to throw them. Boivin sometimes relied on the police to calm her son. "When he's agitated, I'm afraid for him and anybody around him," Boivin says. "You just sit on guard all the time." Boivin and her son live outside of Auburn, in the rural town of Jay. She works as a mental health caseworker for children with mental illnesses. But working in the system offered her no advantage. Brian ended up on waiting lists for counseling, a psychiatrist, in-home support and long-term psychiatric beds. "It was always six months to a year before you could get services," Boivin says. Boivin became so desperate for help, she allowed her son to receive treatment out of state at Charter Brookside, a Nashua, N.H., psychiatric hospital. She later regretted her decision. Federal health authorities shut the hospital down in 1999 because the facility was filthy and children were often unsupervised. Several of them had sex with each other or used light bulbs to slice their wrists. Brian stayed at Charter Brookside for seven months. When he returned to Maine in 1998, there still was little here to help him. His mother, like many other parents, often took her son to the emergency room when he was out of control. She knew the hospital could not turn her away. Left untreated, Brian's rages escalated. In September 2000, Boivin walked into her living room to find her son standing over his 19-year-old sister with a knife in his hand. "Put the knife down," Boivin told her son. He turned toward her and said: "Which one of you wants to go first?" Boivin told her daughter to run to the neighbors and call the police. The local Jay police and a SWAT team arrived and calmed Brian down. The police charged Brian with criminal threatening and escorted him to the ER. Once they learned there were no psychiatric beds available, Brian was placed in the county jail for the night. He returned home the next morning. "I didn't feel too safe," Boivin says. Boivin had good reason to worry. Brian's psychiatrist had warned her and other mental health workers Brian was dangerous and needed long-term psychiatric hospitalization. Yet, he remained on waiting lists. In the months after trying to kill his mother and sister, Brian threatened to get a gun and shoot his teacher. The school kicked him out. Still, he waited eight months for a treatment bed. While he waited, his Lewiston psychiatrist, Eric Griffey, urged Goodwill Hinckley, a group home for troubled boys in Hinckley, to admit Brian. "Brian has been a very difficult young man," Griffey wrote on April 6, 2001. "He has never really been adequately stabilized and his combinations of problems, together with the response that he has gotten from society, have impacted very badly on him and bode very badly for the future." Later that month, the group home agreed to treat Brian. There, the 15-year-old boy was restrained three times for trying to hurt staff. He kicked one female staffer in the chest, fracturing two of her ribs. He threatened to "make this place into a slaughterhouse."
On May 15, six weeks after he arrived, he attacked three staff members with a pen. "I'm going to stab you in the heart," he screamed. One group home worker held his hands over his eyes as Brian lunged toward him and punctured his palm. After restraining Brian, police escorted him to Waterville's Mid-Maine Medical Center's ER. They placed Brian in their critical care unit with a guard outside his door. He lay there 10 days while his caseworker searched for a place to treat him. They found him a bed at Brattleboro Retreat, a Brattleboro, Vt., psychiatric hospital. Boivin didn't want her son to be sent out of state again, but she knew she had little choice. "I didn't like traveling five hours each way to see him," Boivin says. "But it was better than nothing." Brian didn't like being so far from home either. Boivin says her son made some progress in his therapy at the Vermont hospital, but he still had difficulty controlling his rage. He twice destroyed furniture in his hospital room, once ripping apart part of his window and brandishing it at staff. During a September 2001 meeting with hospital staff and his mother, Brian exploded. "He wanted to be out of the hospital and home for Christmas," Boivin says. When Brian learned he wasn't coming home, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and sprayed his social worker. The hospital refused to treat him anymore, and police charged Brian with assault. He returned to Maine, where he was locked up in juvenile detention in Charleston. He remained there nearly five months, while his caseworker tried to find him a psychiatric program in state that would work with Brian and help him control his violent tendencies and wild mood swings. Brian grew depressed and angry as he sat in the juvenile lock-up. He also began writing letters to the Franklin County district attorney and several mental health officials. "I've been in the Mental Health system since I was in the first grade," Brian wrote in December 2001 to the Franklin County district attorney. "It never crossed my mind to spend the holidays in a place like this. You see out of my whole family, not one has spent a day in jail. . . . Every day I wake up to a cold floor, the click, click of pneumatic door locks, and the word . . . COUNT!" In another letter to mental health officials, Brian wrote about his experiences at poorly run Charter Brookside and the Vermont hospital. "Now, I thought the state of Maine didn't want anymore people going in an out-of-state hospital?" he asked. "The first time I went to a hospital out-of-state (Charter Brookside) it wasn't first class at all. That's partly why it was shut down. It's really sad that instead of buying every middle-school child an expensive computer, the state should fund a mental health hospital. It's a long way from central Maine to southern Vermont. Let me know when you build an in-state hospital will you? I'll be in jail at the Northern Maine Juvenile Detention Facility." Brian waited from September 2001 until March 2002 to be admitted to Sweetser Family Services in Saco. Brian lives there on the Saco campus in one of the dorms, where there is round-the-clock supervision. He attends school at Sweetser and works with counselors on taming his violent impulses and redirecting his anger and frustrations. "He seems to be doing OK," Boivin says. "I hope this program can help Brian. We don't have many other options."
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