BOISE, Idaho (Legal Newsline) - A woman who claims employees at a mental-health clinic pushed her to take Prozac over her objections can sue the State of Idaho for her subsequent suicide attempt, the state’s highest court ruled. The plaintiff retrieved a pistol, bought a bottle of vodka and drank it on the way to an appointment with her therapist, and shot herself in the parking lot.
Reversing a lower court’s dismissal of the lawsuit on state immunity grounds, the Idaho Supreme Court ruled jurors might find that employees with the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare triggered an exception for “willful and wanton conduct.” Acknowledging sharp differences in how the two sides recalled events, the court said only a finder of fact can sort it out.
Terri Richardson Mattson had a history of depression, alcohol abuse and at least two suicide attempts when she made an appointment with a state clinic in 2018. She filled out an informed consent form, indicating she had problems with alcohol and depression but denying she had ever attempted suicide or had suicidal thoughts currently.
Several days later she was seen by a licensed professional counselor, where she revealed she had tried to commit suicide when she was 17 and when she was 40 and “drove to a bridge and stood on the edge debating whether to jump after her ugly divorce.” Mattson denied having suicidal thoughts but her husband said she did.
The therapist diagnosed Mattson with depression. Over several subsequent meetings she said she had been drinking vodka. At a meeting with a psychiatrist, she was prescribed Prozac and urged to return in two weeks. Mattson says she never received a handout warning of suicide risk, which the state disputes. Two days after starting the Prozac, Matttson met with her therapist and said she didn’t like the drug. She and her husband claim the therapist told her “she was the professional, and just leave it up to her,” and that Mattson needed to keep taking the pills to see if they would work.
After several more meetings, Mattson woke up, retrieved a .22 caliber handgun from her gun cabinet, bought a bought of vodka and drank driving to a clinic appointment, where she shot herself in the parking lot. She survived the incident with severe injuries including the loss of an eye.
She and her husband sued the state for malpractice, claiming the Prozac led her to commit suicide and she wouldn’t have taken it if the clinic had given her warning literature. A district court dismissed the suit, finding the defendants were acting in “good faith” and, as a matter of law, no reasonable person could foresee that Mattson would get a handgun, drink an entire bottle of vodka and shoot herself in the parking lot.
The Idaho Supreme Court partially reversed in a may 4 decision. While the state is shielded from ordinary negligence suits, the court ruled, the law contains an exception for reckless, wanton and wilful conduct. The trial court erred by injecting another consideration – whether Mattson’s actions were foreseeable – into the equation, the high court ruled.
“The specific kind of harm must be foreseeable—not the specific mechanisms of harm,” the court said.
Clinic employees “knew of the risk attendant to prescribing Prozac and intentionally failed to stop prescribing and specifically encouraged” Mattson to “continue to take the drug over her objections,” a plaintiff expert had testified. Given this evidence, the court concluded, “reasonable minds coulddisagree on whether defendants’ acts and omissions here created an `unreasonable risk of harm’ with a `high degree of probability’ that Mattson would attempt suicide.”