Another mental patient has died while in government care. The solution being touted, as usual, is more government oversight.
The state sent a team Tuesday to help Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro draft new procedures to ensure patients receive proper care.
An investigator’s report released Monday found that 50-year-old Steven Sabock died in April after he at one point choked on medication and had been left sitting in a chair for close to a day at the facility about 50 miles southeast of Raleigh. Surveillance video showed hospital staff watching television and playing cards just a few feet away.
What the article doesn’t make clear, and what journalists almost never explain when writing about these types of deaths is the fact that government is what failed.
Cherry Hospital is a 274-bed inpatient psychiatric hospital serving the citizens of 36 eastern North Carolina counties. We are operated by the state of North Carolina, the Department of Health and Human Services.
Government can’t fix government. We don’t ask doctors to operate on themselves so why do we tout more bureaucracy as a solution to problems of human indifference?
Yes, we can pay someone to watch the people who are watching the patients. Is that cost effective? No. Is it a long-term solution to the problem of people playing cards and watching television while a mental patient sits dead on a nearby chair? No. If your culture and civilization failed to build a conscience into these people, or snuffed out one that was there to being with then you have failed as a society.
Address the culture of indifference. How did that get created?