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ELGIN, Ill. (Legal Newsline) - A husband who blamed his wife’s suicide on a physical attack at the Great America amusement park several years before must turn over her psychiatric records to help determine if the two events were connected, an Illinois appeals court ruled.
The plaintiff identified as John Doe was cited for contempt and fined $100 after he refused a court order to supply records including the name of the healthcare provider who prescribed his late wife medications for schizophrenia, depression and panic attacks. Doe claimed the records were shielded from discovery under the Illinois Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Confidentiality Act.
The Second District Court of Appeals disagreed. In a Feb. 24 decision, the court found that while the confidentiality act protects mental health records in cases of physical injury to the brain, it doesn’t apply when the plaintiff raises the question of psychological impairment. Doe put his wife’s mental health “at issue” when he claimed her injuries from the prior assault caused her to kill herself.
The Illinois Supreme Court has upheld the confidentiality of mental health records in cases not involving suicide, the appeals court found, but the act of suicide necessarily includes an inquiry into the mental state of the victim.
Doe and his wife originally sued Great America in 2017, accusing the park of failing to intervene when a gang of youths attacked them. He added a wrongful death claim after she killed herself in May 2019, blaming her death on “physical injuries to her brain that rendered her bereft of reason and suicidal.” The amusement park moved to obtain her medical records after discovering pharmacy records showing her prescriptions for psychological drugs.
Wrongful death claims over suicide are difficult to win, the appeals court noted, since in most cases courts determine that the connection between a defendant’s actions and the suicide are too distant to prove a legal connection.
“it is the rare case in which the decedent’s suicide would not break the chain of causation and bar a cause of action for wrongful death,” the court ruled. One of the few exceptions is where a brain injury makes a person “insane and bereft of reason.”
“Such proof necessarily entails an examination of her mental condition,” the court concluded.