After Daughter’s Suicide, San Diego Woman Takes Fight To Insurer’s Door
Maria Spivey is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente, whom she blames for her daughter not getting proper mental health treatment.
KQED:
San Diego Mother Mourns While Mental Health Gaps Persist
At first [Maria] Spivey blamed herself. But later, she blamed Kaiser Permanente. Spivey says the HMO failed to take care of her daughter. When Chloe started having trouble with depression and anxiety in middle school, Kaiser told her she couldn’t get weekly individual therapy. “There’s no one-on-one,” Spivey remembers being told. Chloe had attempted suicide once before, when she was 16. Even then, Kaiser did not schedule her into individual therapy. Instead she was put into a weekly group for teens with drug abuse problems. “They didn’t discuss depression, anxiety, PTSD,” Spivey says. No one asked if she was feeling suicidal. “Chloe told me more often than not, ‘Mom, this is not what I need.'” (Dembosky, 5/31)