On April 20 of last year, the body of 15-year-old Jazmin Pellegrini was found face-down in a San Francisco driveway, miles away from home—a death that "shocked the city," reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Jazmin had run away from home days earlier, and authorities determined she died from a fentanyl overdose. A Chronicle investigation has found that fentanyl was only a tiny part of the puzzle, however. Instead, Jazmin's story is one of an adolescent who spiraled into depression as she coped with childhood sexual trauma, and whose condition worsened as she entered the world of for-profit psychiatric treatment centers that are "a central piece of Gov. Gavin Newsom's sweeping behavioral health care reforms," the story explains.
The teen's medical records reveal that between March 2022 and April 2024, she was hospitalized about 40 times in nearly a dozen for-profit and nonprofit psychiatric hospitals, or in the psych units of hospitals and emergency departments, according to the story by Joaquin Palomino and Cynthia Dizikes. The upshot of that:
- "This scattershot hospital care appeared to leave Jazmin without a coordinated treatment plan, particularly with medication. Over those two years, doctors started and stopped more than a dozen different antidepressants, mood stabilizers, antihistamines and other pharmaceuticals. Experts said such a complex combination of drugs in adolescents has unknown side effects."
Reps from Signature, Universal, and Acadia—the health care companies that treated her—declined to answer specific questions about Jazmin's care but disputed the newspaper's account of understaffing and neglect at their facilities. The story makes clear that even well-run psychiatric facilities have an inherently difficult task, but it also suggests Jazmin's case presents an example of a system that failed a teenager in need. (Read the full story.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
