The article has more in depth discussion than the excerpts that I’ve pulled here, please give it a read if you are curious
VANCOUVER - Maya Cassady was just two months away from graduating high school with honours when she obtained her mental health records through a freedom of information request.
Just hours after reading the contents, which included doctors’ ponderings about a diagnosis, the 17-year-old took her own life.
It was March 30, 2023. Since Maya’s death, her mother, Hilary Cassady, has become an advocate for youth mental health, raising flags about young people using FOIs to access their charts — and risking misinterpreting the contents.
Cassady said she believes Maya concluded her mental health condition was untreatable, after reading terminology about her case that was never discussed with either of them.
And while the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of B.C. said the head of a health authority could block the release of documents deemed potentially harmful to a recipient, it said it would “not be possible” to screen all requests.
Cassady said the emergency room psychiatrist who saw Maya on the visit that was the subject of her request did not even know she had sought the records.
In most of B.C.'s health authorities, including Vancouver Coastal Health where Maya was treated, people can request their medical records without the consent of a legal guardian starting at age 12.
Cassady said she was unsure when her daughter made the FOI request, but believes she collected it from the family mailbox the same day she died.
The request, Cassady said, focused on a four-day stay at Lions Gate Hospital in February 2023 after an acetaminophen overdose that a doctor believed was an “impulsive” suicide attempt by Maya.
Cassady said her daughter’s friends reported seeing her reading the FOI documents and Googling terms on her ferry commute to school from Bowen Island, off West Vancouver, and again during her spare period later that morning. She died later that day.
“She had given up hope when she felt that her diagnosis was untreatable — that was the response when she Google searched some of the terminology in the report,” Hilary said of her daughter.
She said she drew that conclusion after looking at her daughter’s phone in the days after her death, trying to piece together her state of mind. She said one of the last search results that showed up in the teen’s phone browser was that her symptoms were “untreatable.”
“That is etched in my brain,” she said of the word, sure of what she saw but noting that she has not been able to duplicate the search results since.
Cassady said her daughter searched, “Is persistent depressive disorder lifelong?” She also looked up terms, including “axis II traits” and “bd-ii,” which most commonly refers to bipolar II, her mother said.
The chart also classified the girl’s “admitting diagnoses” as “chronic dysthymia vs unspecified depressive disorder,” and said the teen was “not acutely suicidal.”
Cassady said Maya had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder but neither of them had been informed of most of the other terms included in her chart, including the working theory she may have undiagnosed borderline personality disorder.
I’m very curious, what makes you call CBT and EMDR trash?
To be clear, this is just my opinion, and it’s based on my experiences with psychiatrists as someone with pretty severe PTSD and other mental health issues.
Neither of those approaches tackles underlying emotional issues. They’re popular because they give an easy-to-follow framework for “treating” very complex emotional issues. CBT is especially bad IMO, because it’s more like teaching people how to mask and distract themselves from the effects of emotional issues rather than actually resolving them.
EMDR is like a “one neat trick” approach to tackling trauma, as if moving eyes around is some sort of magic spell to reverse trauma. In my experience, trauma is treated through reprocessing traumatic memories, and while EMDR does focus on reprocessing memories, it’s a brute force approach, rather than a careful and measured approach, where emotional issues are slowly and steadily unpicked at a pace which is comfortable to the client.
Fair enough. I’m sorry those weren’t helpful for you, I also found CBT to be less helpful than DBT and family model therapy.
I know a lot of trauma-exposed professionals that EMDR has been life-changing for, so I was really curious where that opinion came from. I think it has a lot of merit- like that one study that demonstrated the Tetris effect is helpful for reducing PTSD after a critical incident. A good professional won’t move to EMDR until the client is ready to tackle the memories, I know for some it’s been 6 months before talking about the original issue that caused them to seek out therapy. Every time you recount the traumatizing event it can retraumatize, so tackling it too soon (or needing to go through it over and over so workers comp can pay for the therapy you need after getting traumatized at work) is dangerous.
EMDR absolutely can be used by professionals, but where I live, it is used exclusively and very rushed. You are given a pre-allocated block of, say, six sessions, where you are expected to pretty much immediately get into the traumatic memories from the first session, and if you are resistant, you’re told that you are wasting time.
That’s why I hate EMDR, because it is held up as the “evidence-backed” method and thus professionals are functionally forced into rushing it, because the insurance provider won’t pay for the likely months or years of therapy it takes to do therapy in a safe and healthy way.
Again, just from my own personal experience and that of my friends who have been through it.