Goverment Nightmare Sentences Man to Hell in a Psych Ward

As seen in this editorial

Charles Haroutunian’s ordeal is a classic illustration of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and how much worse that hell can be once too many well-intentioned government and legal agencies enter the fray.

After a 2002 suicide attempt, the Sun Lakes resident found himself at the mercy of no less than four government agencies or contractors, each of whom had a role to play once the suicidal 76-year-old man had been transferred from another hospital to Maricopa Medical Center, and his family had decided to have him committed to a mental institution.

This became possible when one of two court-appointed psychiatrists testified he met the criteria, and the other failed to show up. Once the process was set in motion, nobody seemed to want to be at the steering wheel. Value Options, which handles the county’s mental health care services, claimed it was responsible for outpatient treatment only, ceding the job to the county hospital, which in turn deferred to the Veterans Administration, who would be footing the bill.

The VA would only pay for him to be sent to a Tucson nursing home for the severely mentally ill; Haroutunian, now 80, wasn’t in any shape to protest.

“I just thought I had my 180 days of punishment for breaking man’s law and God’s law for trying to take my life,” he told the Tribune’s Gary Grado, in a story that ran Tuesday.

In reality, he faced a potential life sentence, after his case was never transferred into the Pima County supervision it needed, but instead was mistakenly closed out by a Value Options employee. It was only the arrival of a sympathetic psychologist at the nursing home and having the means to hire a lawyer to track his case down that saved Haroutunian. Even then, it took four years for him to receive any compensation for having spent months in a locked ward with about 30 other patients who were not capable of communicating with him in any way other than spitting in his food.

The $310,250 court award, reached in October, divvied up the blame among two agencies — as much an indictment of an overgrown state that cannot keep track of which paperwork went down which rabbit hole, as anything else.

The process of this and so many other tasks, jury-rigged like a computer with a spaghetti nest of wires underneath it, must be streamlined. There is an agency, the Maricopa County Public Fiduciary, responsible for protecting the rights of vulernable adults, and it was found by the trial jury to be relatively less liable for Haroutunian’s treatment.

The map needs be redrawn so the agency that has the ultimate responsibility can’t credibly pass the buck to another entity, particularly a government contractor. This isn’t about paperwork, it is about people, and they should be treated better if for no other reason than they need someone to look out for their best interests, not create more problems for them.