Colorado mom whose 14-year-old died by suicide pushes for better emergency room care for kids in mental health crisis

Laura Love is both haunted and motivated by the decision to take her 13-year-old son Sam Aden to an emergency room after he shared feelings of despair in early 2022.

“We had no idea what to expect once we got there, we just knew that when your kid is experiencing a mental health crisis you take them to the ER,” Love said. “What we found was an environment that wasn’t hope-based, it was based in fear.” 

Sam, who was defined by his kindness for others, was separated from his parents on and off for nine hours while he underwent evaluation. For safety reasons he was stripped of all his personal belongings and monitored in a secure holding room. 

“He was left alone without the people who love him or supportive elements of any kind for long periods of time,” Love said. “It was a traumatic situation for him and for us (his parents).”

An alarming number of teens facing a mental health crisis in our state are thrown into a failed mental health system which is more punitive than healing and can actually dangerously increase their suicide risk.

In the depths of a statewide psychiatric bed shortage, which left a record-breaking number of kids languishing in the bleak, institutional ERs for days and even weeks, the family felt fortunate to find an outpatient program. 

The six-week program allowed Sam to get treatment during the day and sleep in his own bed at night. But once he was discharged, his mom was surprised by the lack of a comprehensive treatment plan or any subsequent follow up.

“Kids are getting stuck in institutions waiting for care and then when they are released there’s no clear path forward for them,” said Heidi Baskfield, CEO of Speak Our Minds: Ending the Youth Mental Health Crisis. “We should have the same expectation for mental health as we do for physical health; that a person will receive the care they need and as a result of that care should get better.” 

Sam’s family set up a plan of care that included regular therapy and medical check-ups. They also moved him to a new school.

During this time, the teen did several interviews about his own experiences to “keep other kids from going through what he went through,” Love said. “We thought he was doing so well. I thought our fight was over.” 

Things seemed to be going OK, until they weren’t

Sam was doing well at school and busily pursuing his passions for photography, snowboarding and playing guitar. He had signed up to be a junior camp counselor for the summer on the horizon. 

Even though things seemed smooth on the surface, his mom checked in with him regularly, asking him to rate his mental health on a scale from 1-10.

“In July of ‘22 when he told me he was really struggling — down at a two or three  I told him we should take him to the ER to get checked out,” she said. “He told me, ‘I’m not going back there, mom, it’s too scary.’” 

Without the emergency room as a resource, Laura got her son back into intensive therapy and spent several nights sleeping on his floor until he was stabilized. By all visible measures, Sam showed improvement in the fall of 2022 and into the spring of 2023. But on May 4, 2023, the young man with a heart so big he told his family he loved them every day, was gone — lost to suicide.

Survivors will tell you the “whys” of suicide are endless, and even when all added together, the answers to that gnawing question come nowhere near justifying the loss of a life. 

But Sam’s mother says she will forever be left wondering if her son had a supportive place to go and get treatment during an acute crisis if he would have survived his mental health struggles. 

“The ER should be a lifeline in a child’s darkest moment,” she said. “Since it is often the first entry point in a mental health crisis it can be the deciding factor of whether a child is willing to come back for treatment or not.”

Since her son’s death Love has become an advocate for change in a system that added to her son’s struggles rather than help him heal. 

“He was in a mental health crisis and already dysregulated and everything that happened to him in the ER didn’t help that,” Love said. “Where was the treatment plan, the hope for what’s next?”

Emergency rooms don’t provide mental health treatment, the staff there only do assessments. 

If a young person is deemed to not be an imminent threat to themselves or others they are transferred to an outpatient program or simply sent home with the recommendation to seek therapeutic help. If an appropriate program is not available and they are deemed to be a threat, under state law they are involuntarily hospitalized for a minimum of 72 hours.

Charlotte, who asked her real name not be used to protect her identity, was 16 when she was put under an involuntary hold at UCHealth Mountain Crest Hospital in Fort Collins just before Christmas 2020. 

She had sent an email to a friend saying “I wonder what the world would be like without me.” 

The friend shared it with the psychologist they were both seeing at the time. Although Charlotte and the therapist had an appointment scheduled for later that day, the therapist sent her to the ER for evaluation. Based on the email, the ER staff locked the door behind the teen and her nightmare began. She was in a cell-like room for 11 hours before being transferred to Mountain Crest.

“When I went into Mountain Crest I had just begun thinking about suicide as an option — so maybe a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10,” she said. “When I came out I was a 9.5. I was not going back there, so I started formulating the most efficient ways to kill myself so I would be dead by the time they got to me.”

In 2021, the last year for which data is available, 3,291 youth under age 18 were deemed to be an imminent threat to themselves and involuntarily hospitalized, said Alexandra Eliot, acting chief communications officer at the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration.

Once in the mental health system, an alarming number of youth stay there too long. 

According to the Behavioral Health Administration, In the third quarter of 2024, 209 people under age 21 spent more than 12 hours in the ER waiting for placement in an appropriate psychiatric facility and nine stayed for more than 72 hours. That’s a significant improvement from the last quarter of 2023, when the agency started collecting data, when 518 youth under age 21 spent more than 12 hours in the ER and 51 were kept longer than 72 hours before being released to a lower-level of care (including their own home). 

Charlotte was isolated for the majority of her 72-hour hold, told her crying would upset the other patients.

“I wasn’t even allowed to see my mom — security actually pulled her away from the window of my room,” she said. “The next day I was on a phone call with her and the nurse hung up the phone because I started crying. I was alone in hell and I just kept wondering what I did wrong to be there.” 

For three years after her involuntary hospitalization the teen refused to speak with a licensed therapist because they are mandated to report anyone they feel is suicidal.

“The experience changes the way you see the world, from safe to scary — a place where you could be hauled off to jail for being sad,” Charlotte said.

Many kids are reluctant to return to inpatient care

Sam and Charlotte aren’t alone in their resistance to return to the hospital for mental health treatment.  A peer-reviewed study, published in 2021 in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, of youth involuntarily hospitalized for psychiatric concerns, showed two-thirds of those surveyed saying they would keep suicidal thoughts to themselves rather than risk going back to the ER. Factors identified as contributing to distrust of the mental health system  included “perceptions of inpatient treatment as more punitive than therapeutic, staff as more judgmental than empathetic, and hospitalization overall failing to meet therapeutic needs.”

Overall, 66% of the study sample met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) resulting from trauma associated with symptom onset, traumatic treatment experiences, or a combination.

“I would always think about it, I don’t want to go back to an [inpatient facility]. I can’t tell anyone I’m feeling this way because they’re just going to send me back,” one study participant wrote. “I kind of knew if I had a plan that was kind of the red flag for the therapist, so I never said I had a plan even though I was hoarding pills for a good three years [all while in therapy]. I just remember always wanting to do it [suicide] but not saying anything.”

Dr. Andrew Sylvester is a UCHealth psychiatrist who specializes in child/adolescent psychiatry.

“We’re not ogres, we’re here to help people,” Sylvester said. “We can’t be expected to be right 100% of the time, but I would rather err on the side of caution than miss somebody who needs to be stabilized and lose a life.”

Sylvester, whose practice is in Longmont, says that there are always variables in staffing at psychiatric facilities, but they do everything possible to respect the dignity of the individuals in their care. 

“Yes, involuntary hospitalization is traumatic, but in some cases necessary,” he said.

The Padilla family’s entry into the mental health system started outside the hospital when a concerned adult contacted police about their 15-year-old son Jack. 

“They took Jack away in handcuffs and put him in the back of a cop car,” said Jack’s dad, Rick Padilla. “My son wasn’t a criminal, but he was handled as one.”

Like Love, Padilla is haunted by memories of his son’s ER visit. 

“When I found Jack at the hospital he was in tears with a big burly cop sitting next to him,” Padilla said. “He was looking down with his hair over his eyes, but I could see the tears rolling down his cheeks.”

Jack, an enthusiastic lacrosse goalie since he was only 5 years old, was known for his altruism, empathy and strength. His dad said that the gentle young man who was relentlessly bullied at school, felt the mental health system was punitive. He died by suicide on Valentine’s Day 2019.   

“We need to look at the protocols and find ways to de-escalate when a young person is having a mental health crisis so that they are willing to seek help again,” Padilla said.

After his son’s death, Rick turned to other teens for answers of how to lower suicide risk.

“The kids are all talking about mental health, they think it’s time to destigmatize the conversation,” he said. “I’ve focused on this niche of elevating the conversation.” 

Padilla changed careers following his son’s death, moving out of his work in affordable housing to become the City of Denver’s first suicide prevention administrator. He hosts We Got This! Denver’s youth mental health programming in local schools. Padilla has dedicated himself to filling gaps in the mental health system that failed Jack.     

“We need a different approach so that when a young person is in crisis they aren’t refusing to go to the hospital, that it’s a place where they know they will get help instead of feeling punished for doing something wrong,” Padilla said.  

A new model for caring for kids in crisis

Dr. K. Ron-Li Liaw is the Mental Health In-Chief at Children’s Hospital Colorado, where they are pioneering a new model for youth who come to the ER in a mental health crisis.  

“The number one thing we need to build is trust,” she said. “When (the screening process) is done well, kids are put into programs with other kids dealing with similar issues. Surrounded by kids going through the same thing they are able to learn together.”  

Under the Children’s model only 10% of hospitalizations are involuntary. 

“The majority of psychiatric units are not our unit, “ Liaw said. “We are a trauma-informed healing model. Seclusion has been found to be punitive and traumatic.”

Children’s psychiatric unit is zero-restraint, zero-isolation and fully transparent to parents. 

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“(Without transparency) it’s like a black box model that leaves parents wondering: ‘What am I sending my kid into?’,” she said. 

Love serves on the mental health Family Advisory Council at Children’s in Aurora to add her experience to the work the hospital is doing to improve the system of care for kids experiencing mental health issues. 

“Imagine if we could create a system for mental health like the one we have for cancer, where you come into the hospital, are diagnosed and then receive a treatment plan,” she said. “Appointments are made, there’s a clear path forward. With mental health it’s triage at best.” 

When Sam was 8 or 9 he made a mobile that Love still keeps on her desk. It’s made of brightly-colored pieces of paper that say his dreams: “I have a dream of no wars”  “I have a dream there will be clean air.” “I have a dream I will help the world.”

“He’s doing it. He’s just not physically by my side,” Love said. “But he is helping the world.”

HOW TO HELP: The Get Grounded Foundation’s Sam Aden Kindness Fund (Tax ID #46-5125610) has raised more than $400,000 to date to support youth mental health awareness. For more information visit: Sam Aden Kindness Fund