MANDEL: Widow sues psychiatrists after son kills husband
Should psychiatrists be held liable if their patient kills?
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Brad McKee should never have been sent home to live with his parents.
He was about 16 when his mental health symptoms began to emerge in 2008. Over the next decade, he was diagnosed with a medicine chest of mental health issues including depression, substance abuse, opiate dependency, suicidal thoughts, panic disorder, unspecified personality disorder, and borderline antisocial personality.
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According to court documents, McKee also had a long history of self-harm as well as aggressive behaviour – in 2016, he was charged with assaulting a police officer and both his parents, Anna and Bill McKee.
While at the Central North Correctional Centre (CNCC) in Penetanguishene, Dr. Gunter Lorberg assessed him with an anxiety disorder, an over-reliance on Benzodiazepines and a serious opioid addiction.
The following year, court documents show McKee was charged with impaired operation of a vehicle and released on house arrest to his sureties – his parents.
While on bail in 2018, court documents state he armed himself with two knives and got into a fight with his parents. Apprehended under the Mental Health Act, he was taken to Waypoint Centre for Mental Health with the recommendation from Georgian Bay Hospital that he be admitted for long-term care.
He was released the next day. It was the fifth time in less than three years McKee had been admitted to Waypoint’s Acute Assessment Program.
Five days later, while acting strangely after returning from an appointment with Lorberg, he went for a walk and didn’t come home. Police found him in a forest, having overdosed on methadone and a panic disorder medication.
Hospitalized for 12 days at the local hospital, McKee was then transferred to Waypoint, again, on Dec. 12, 2018.
According to court records, his parents wrote a letter pleading with the mental health hospital to keep their son for treatment: “They noted that his mental health was seriously deteriorating and that he was paranoid and becoming increasingly delusional. He expressed a belief, for instance, that the Chinese government was spying on him and that his parents were conspiring against him.
“Dr. Raheel Shahid was the attending psychiatrist at Waypoint on December 12, 2018. He discharged Bradley that same day.”
McKee continued weekly appointments with Lorberg at the Ontario Addiction Treatment Centre in Barrie. On Jan. 25, 2019, his office wrote him a letter expressing concerns about his assaultive behaviour there.
It would soon prove deadly.
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On Feb. 11, 2019, McKee experienced a psychotic episode while at home with his parents. His mom managed to run for help while he fatally stabbed his father in the neck and then tried to kill himself.
Convicted of first-degree murder in 2022, he’s serving life in prison with no parole for 25 years – a sentence he challenged in court last month as “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Now, his mother is suing the two psychiatrists who treated or assessed her son before the murder, alleging they owed her husband and herself a “duty of care” to appropriately treat their son and to warn them of any danger he posed to them.
None of those claims have been proven in court.
Shahid and Lorberg denied her allegations and urged the judge to throw out her entire lawsuit, arguing that it is settled law that a healthcare professional doesn’t owe a duty of care to a non-patient third party.
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Ontario Superior Court Justice Cary Boswell agreed – to a point. In a decision released earlier this month, the judge said it was clear the psychiatrists didn’t owe a duty of care to the parents in terms of the treatments they prescribed because it would place them in an impossible conflict of interest.
“Patients with mental illnesses may also be dissuaded from seeking out psychiatric care, if they know that their treating psychiatrist is going to be making decisions about their care with regard to how those decisions may impact on third parties,” he wrote. “Patients and society at large will both suffer in the result.”
Less clear, he said, is whether the psychiatrists had a duty to warn McKee’s parents of the danger their son posed.
“I am dubious of its likelihood of success for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that Bradley’s parents appear to have been well aware of the risk he posed to himself and others,” the judge wrote. “I am satisfied that this claim, while novel, and perhaps tenuous, is at least arguable.”
Boswell allowed the widow to refile her statement of claim on that “novel” issue alone.
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