Psychiatric Facilities Are Facing A Growing Mental Health Crisis Among Young Patients

If you placed a young family member in a psychiatric facility because you believed it was the safest place for them, you made that choice out of love. You trusted that trained professionals would keep your child, your teenager, or your young adult safe. When that trust is broken, the grief that follows is unlike almost anything else, and so is the question that won’t stop: could this have been prevented?

A landmark study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms what many families may have sensed for years. Researchers at the Huntsman Mental Health Institute at the University of Utah analyzed 122 years of U.S. mortality data and found that suicide risk among young people has been rising steadily since the mid-to-late 1950s. “What we’re seeing is not a short-term spike but a generational shift. Each successive generation has faced higher suicide risk at a younger age than the one before it,” said University of Utah assistant professor of psychiatry Nina de Lacy, the study’s lead researcher.

That finding matters for families dealing with the aftermath of a psychiatric facility’s failure. Rising youth suicide rates place a greater burden on mental health providers to meet the standard of care, not a lesser one. The Law Offices of Skip Simpson has spent decades holding psychiatric hospitals and mental health facilities accountable when they fail to protect the patients placed in their care.

What Did Researchers Discover About Suicide?

The University of Utah study drew on data spanning from 1900 to 2021, making it the most comprehensive long-term picture of U.S. suicide trends ever assembled. Historically, older adults have carried the highest suicide risk. That has shifted sharply. Today, suicide is among the leading causes of death for Americans between the ages of 10 and 34, and the research shows that rate climbed among younger people for more than six consecutive decades.

The study also found that if the country had maintained its lowest observed age-specific suicide rates, more than 372,000 deaths could have been prevented between 1969 and 2021. That number carries a weight that’s hard to absorb. It tells us these deaths were not inevitable. They happened because something wasn’t working, and in too many cases, what wasn’t working was the care inside a psychiatric facility—and they know it.

Some of the other findings deserve attention as well. The data showed that suicide rates among young women in rural and smaller urban communities have risen sharply in recent years, and that hanging has increased significantly as a method since the 1980s, forming what the researchers describe as a trend that has received far less attention than other methods. These are exactly the kinds of details that matter when assessing whether a facility took appropriate precautions.

Psychiatric Facilities Have Clear Responsibilities Under The Standard Of Care

When a patient is admitted to a psychiatric facility, that facility assumes a legal duty of care. The standard of care in suicide prevention is not vague or undefined. It includes specific, documented obligations that trained clinicians and facility staff are expected to follow.

• Thorough Suicide Risk Assessment On Admission: Every patient admitted for psychiatric care must be assessed for suicide risk using accepted clinical protocols, not a brief intake form completed by an undertrained staff member. Competent clinicians know a suicidal person cannot be expected to volunteer the truth about suicide plans; the judgment of a suicidal person is clouded, thinking is confused, and cannot be relied upon to adequately assess its own dangerous state. The clinician MUST understand the Suicide Crisis Syndrome and its five recognizable criteria. See The Suicidal Crisis: Clinical Guide to the Assessment of Imminent Suicide Risk, Second Edition, Igor Galynker (2023). When a patient denies being suicidal, that is the start of the assessment, not the end.
• Ongoing Monitoring Throughout The Patient’s Stay: A risk assessment done at admission does not cover the patient’s entire hospitalization. Facilities must reassess patients regularly, especially when their behavior or condition changes. Reassessment means a good systematic suicide assessment again. Know that the patient likely still wants to die. Hope is needed badly.
• A Safe Physical Environment: Psychiatric units are required to remove or secure materials that a patient could use to harm themselves. Ligature points, unsecured medications, and inadequate room checks are all preventable failures. Pretend you are the patient and you want to die. How would you do it? Look around for ways you could kill yourself—the patient is.
• Appropriate Level of Monitoring: Suicidal patients need to be on one-to-one monitoring or line-of-sight at all times. Patients who die in psychiatric hospitals are mostly on every 15-minute monitoring, a dangerous practice. Reducing staffing to cut costs while patients remain at serious risk is a serious breach of the standard of care.
• Safe Discharge Planning: Releasing a patient who is still at elevated risk to go home without a proper safety plan, without follow-up appointments scheduled, and without family notification is one of the most dangerous failures a facility can make. The period after discharge is the most dangerous time for a suicide attempt.

These are not aspirational guidelines. They are the standard of care that courts and medical experts hold psychiatric facilities to, and when hospitals cut corners on any of them, the consequences can be catastrophic. If they are not, the hospital just got lucky.

Why Psychiatric Facilities Fail And Why Accountability Matters

Skip Simpson has spent many years handling these complex cases. The University of Utah study reinforces what our law firm has seen repeatedly: suicide risk among young patients is real, well-documented, and manageable when proper care is provided. The tragedy is that many facilities know the risks and still fail to take adequate action.

The protocols and practices inside many psychiatric hospitals reveals troubling patterns. The odds of any single patient dying by suicide may appear statistically low to administrators or insurers. But when warning signs are ignored, assessments are incompetent, monitoring is inadequate, room checks are rushed, staffing levels are inadequate, or discharge decisions are made too quickly, the risks increase dramatically.

After a death occurs, facilities and insurance carriers often move quickly to defend their decisions. In all cases, they attempt to shift blame onto the patient or the patient’s family rather than confront what the hospital failed to do.

This is why families should keep several important issues in mind:

• Families Are Not To Blame: If a loved one was admitted to a psychiatric facility and died by suicide there, the facility’s conduct, not your family’s choices, is what the law examines.
• Records Often Reveal What Happened: Medical records, staffing logs, room check documentation, and discharge paperwork may show whether the facility followed accepted standards or ignored them. Sometimes these records are altered—we catch them at this crime.
• Time Limits Apply: States impose statutes of limitations on medical malpractice claims. Waiting too long to investigate can permanently affect a family’s ability to pursue accountability.

How We Help Families After Psychiatric Facility Failures

The Law Offices of Skip Simpson represents families across the country who have lost a loved one to suicide following failures in psychiatric care. Attorney Skip Simpson is nationally recognized in this area of law and has handled inpatient suicide cases in dozens of states.

When we take a case, we investigate the facility’s policies, examine staffing decisions, retain independent medical experts, and build the factual record necessary to determine whether the standard of care was violated.

If your family is trying to understand what happened to a loved one inside a psychiatric hospital or mental health facility, we are here to listen and provide a clear explanation of your legal options. You owe us nothing unless we recover compensation for your family. There are no upfront legal fees and no costs to begin the process.

Contact the Law Offices of Skip Simpson for a free, confidential consultation. Families who trusted a psychiatric facility to protect their loved one deserve answers, accountability, and a full understanding of what legal options may be available moving forward.