The Young and the Restless Spoilers: Mia St. John Says Broken Mental Health System Led to Deaths of Kristoff and Julian

The Young and the Restless news confirms it has been one year since the tragic death of soap legend Kristoff St. John. Four years prior, the couple lost their son, Julian St. John after he committed suicide inside what was supposed to be a protective psychiatry unit. On The Doctors, Mia talked about the mental health system and its failures that she said contributed to both her husband and child’s deaths.

Preventable Deaths in Psychiatric Hospitals

On the February 4, 2020 episode of The Doctors, the segment began with a report that the Los Angeles Times conducted an investigation. The newspaper found that there were more than 100 preventable deaths that occurred inside California psychiatric hospitals in the last 10 years.

Kristoff and Mia’s son, Julian was one of those cases.

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The First Signs of Trouble

Before Julian’s death, he would enter a California psychiatric hospital and would not come out alive. Mia said that within days of his admittance, she began noticing trouble. There were plastic bags laying around (a hazard for those who are suicidal). However, she kept being assured that the bags would be taken away and everything would be fine.

However, everything would not be fine and one of those plastic bags would be wrapped around Julian’s head. He was found dead inside the same facility that was supposed to protect him. The same one that kept telling Mia that they would remove those same plastic bags. The same hospital that kept saying everything would be fine.

Mental Health System Failure

Mia discussed how the mental health system failed her son. She said,

“There were so many errors starting from having plastic bags inside a psychiatric unit — a high-risk unit, not doing the mandatory checks… “

Mia said that they know mandatory checks were not being done because they watched the surveillance video. In those videos, it is shown that the staff was writing down they were doing the required checks when nobody had gone into Julian’s room.

“Also, my son was on a powerful antipsychotic, which toxicology came back and there was no antipsychotic in his system.”

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Understaffing and Not Enough Beds

There are many problems in the mental health care system in America. On The Doctors, understaffing and not enough bed were brought up and those are valid points. As a mental health advocate, the problems I see are the “revolving door” of pushing patients out before they are ready to go back out into society. This is done sometimes for insurance purposes, financial reasons or because someone else needs to come in and take their bed.

Cost of Psychiatric Medications

There is also an issue with affording the medications. Many psychiatric prescriptions are thousands of dollars. NOt everyone has health insurance and those that do, many times the insurance company will refuse to pay for the drugs that will help the patients the most.

Sometimes Patients Have Nowhere to Go

Then, there is the problem of where do these patients go when they are released? Not everyone has a family or a place of their own. In the state of Texas, mental health budgets were drastically cut several years ago. This led to the closure of many group homes, a safe place for those who were ready to be released from the hospital but who could not be trusted on their own. This led to many of them being displaced, put in overcrowded homes elsewhere or they became homeless.

In summary, Mia St. John is absolutely right when she says that the mental health system is broken. And it’s time that officials take this seriously and create an action plan to fix it.

Be sure to catch up on everything happening with Mia St. John right now. Come back here often for The Young and the Restless spoilers, news, updates, and rumors!