Psychiatric hospitals turn away patients who need care

by Eli Cahan for ProPublica

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This article describes attempted suicide.

Late one Saturday night in May 2023, Melissa Keele’s phone rang. Her son had been found alone in the desert of Colorado’s Grand Valley. He was naked; his clothes, phone, keys and car were nowhere to be found.

Keele rushed out to her own vehicle and floored it, her headlights piercing through the pitch black. For years, her son had been dealing with severe mental illness. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he hit a breaking point and attempted suicide by driving off a cliff on the highway. “God told him he needed to die,” Keele recalled him telling her.

Eventually, she