Posted on 09/20/2006 8:28:56 PM PDT by neverdem
In the hour before he was killed, on Sunday, Sept. 3, Dr. Wayne S. Fenton, a prominent schizophrenia specialist, was helping his wife clear the gutters of their suburban Washington house. He was steadying the ladder, asking her to please stop showering debris on his clean shirt; he had just made an appointment to see a patient and wanted to look presentable. She said she would be happy to go along, to help control the patient.
It was a running joke between them. For in this part of the country, Dr. Fenton was the therapist of last resort, the one who could settle down and get through to the most severely psychotic, resistant patients, seemingly by sheer force of sympathy and good will. An associate director at the National Institute of Mental Health, he met with patients on weekends, sometimes late at night, at all hours.
“Absolutely the most nonthreatening person you ever, ever met,” his wife, Nancy Fenton, said in an interview last week.
At 4:52 p.m. that Sunday, the Montgomery County police found the 53-year-old psychiatrist dead in his small office, a few minutes’ drive from his house. They soon tracked down the patient he had agreed to meet that afternoon, Vitali A. Davydov, 19, of North Potomac, who admitted he had beaten the doctor with his fists, according to charging documents. When the young man left the office, “Dr. Fenton was on the ground, bleeding from the face,” the documents said.
Dr. Fenton had known that the patient presented some risk: he was young, male, severely psychotic and struggling with a mental state that was frightening and unfamiliar. The psychiatrist was trying to persuade his patient to continue taking medication, Mrs. Fenton said.
The killing, besides devastating the two families involved, has deeply shaken mental health workers...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Dr. Fenton was, by all accounts, a great human being.
Except when they are taking their meds and then sometimes that makes them paranoid. I know someone who is dealing with this disease now. They are having a very hard time. But, he/she is the most kind hearted person that you would ever want to meet. He/she finds it difficult to ride an elevator without freaking out.
If he was that unstable, what we're his family or keeper's thinking letting him out in public alone and able to go off the deep end, as he did, at a moment's notice.
You know, I wouldn't accept a leading paragraph like that in a novel, much less in a serious news piece.
"It was a dark and stormy night..."
Well, because until an individual has either been committed to an institution for their mental illness or has committed a crime there is no legal basis to detain them. That may be the case here.
In Monky County it's nearly impossible to keep even the most dangerous schizophrenic locked up. Some friends of mine are dealing with this tragic problem in their family. Their grown son has tried to kill his sweet mother and little sister, but there is no legal way to force him to stay locked up. The law is an ass.
Or from a dyed in the wool lib traitor named Benedict no less!
Cardiologist's 'living chip' changes science of disease monitoring
Birth-control patch may increase blood clot risk chat, so much for frontpage at Houston Chronicle
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
and, getting someone "committeed" usually means they have to have "committed a crime."
You gotta understand- he was such a great psychologist, he got his wife to climb the ladder and clean out the gutters while he held the ladder, all dressed up. Must be some kind of gestalt thing.
No actually not. An individual who displays a propensity for violence doesn't have to have committed any crime. I am not sure how difficult it would be to commit someone, but a psychiatrist can do it without having to prove any history of violence.
I guess anytime you start pokin around in someone's head, there are good things you might find there and dangerous things... very dangerous... as well.
It is a sad incident, though. I will never understand societies obsession/expectation with being totally safe no matter what they do. I see the car crash tests and think "Well, that's nice, but it's way better if you don't smash into something at 75 miles an hour in the first place."
Well, that wasn't the case with a relative of mine back around 1987 in WA State......I was told BY a psychiatrist that she would have to have harmed someone BEFORE she could be committed.
Pepper foam.
While I was a resident physician, in New York, it was called 2PC, as in 2 Physicians were needed to recommend Commitment, the patients being deemed a physical threat to themselves or others.
Well, it would explain the shower of debris on his clean shirt.
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