Mississippi Injury Lawyers / Mississippi Suicide Malpractice Lawyer

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Mississippi Suicide Malpractice Lawyer

With Personal Injury Law Offices in Oxford and Tupelo

If you lost a loved one due to the negligence of a medical care professional that lead to their suicide, please contact us right away. Compensation cannot begin to take away the grief but you deserve to get justice. Call Our Mississippi suicide malpractice lawyer right away to set up a free consultation.

Bringing a Lawsuit Based on a Suicide

A suicide may be directly related to malpractice by a medical care provider. You may be eligible for a claim if you lost someone due to medical malpractice. You may feel hesitant to bring a claim for this incident. We encourage you to do so in order to get justice as well as to hold that liable party responsible for their wrongdoing. You may be able to help others avoid the same fate. The negligent party may be a psychiatrist or a psychologist in your lawsuit. They may not have evaluated the risk of suicide properly and failed to do the following:
  • determine if there had been past suicide attempts or suicidal thoughts
  • look into the family history to see if anxiety and depression were present
  • assess the risk of suicide in their patient
  • protect your loved one from committing suicide

Breach of Duty by a Medical Care Professional

Suicide is not always clearly present. It happens all the time where someone seems perfectly fine to their family and it’s shocking that they took their life. The problem with malpractice is that the psychiatrist or psychologist is expected to be able to foresee something like suicide. It’s not a prediction, but they have to identify if someone is a suicide risk. They are then responsible for preventing a foreseeable suicide. An all too common case of malpractice is a patient getting discharged too early resulting in their suicide.

The Eligible Plaintiff in a Suicide Malpractice Claim

Your Mississippi suicide malpractice lawyer can help determine who the plaintiff in your case is. WE acknowledge that everyone who knows the victim is going to be affected by their suicide, but legally, only one certain individual is eligible to bring a claim. If there was malpractice involved that lead a patient to come very close to death by a suicide attempt, that surviving patient is going to be the plaintiff. If the victim committed suicide, someone from their family is going to bring the claim on their behalf. Typically a claim is brought by the spouse, parent, or children of the deceased. In some cases there is an estate with an executor. That person would be the plaintiff. It varies from case to case so make sure you touch base with a skilled Mississippi suicide malpractice lawyer to verify who the plaintiff in your case is.

Suicide Risk Assessment

It is the job of the psychiatrist or the psychologist to perform an assessment on their patient to see if they are a suicide risk. They have to look at the patient’s medical history to see if there were suicide attempts in the past, evaluate their current state of mental health, and be able to determine if they might reasonably foresee that they might commit suicide. They have a duty of care to try to prevent a suicide.

How Your Mississippi Suicide Malpractice Lawyer Proves Negligence

If the suicide is related to a psychiatrist or psychologist’s inability to identify a suicide risk in a patient, you then have to prove they were negligent in order to bring your claim. That means you have to show that their actions were substandard care that was due to their patient. Social workers, therapists, counselors, doctors, nurses as well as psychiatrists and psychologists can all be held negligent for failing to identify suicide risks. If you were to go for a physical with your primary care doctor, you likely had a nurse come in to take your height, weight, blood pressure and pulse. More and more places are asking patients about their anxiety and depression. If they should have reasonably suspected suicide and did nothing the prevent it, they may be liable for the patient’s death.

Linking Negligence to the Suicide

Once your Mississippi suicide malpractice lawyer proves negligence, they have to then prove that this negligence was linked to your loved one’s suicide. There may be expert medical testimony that says the liable party should have reasonably seen a suicide risk in their patient and should have done something to try to prevent it. To have a claim, the liable party must have seen a suicide risk and done nothing to stop it. If they saw the risk and tried to stop it but was unsuccessful, that is likely not a malpractice claim.

Call Our Mississippi Suicide Malpractice Lawyer

If you have lost a loved one to suicide and you think you’re eligible for a claim, please call Brad Morris our Mississippi suicide malpractice lawyer as soon as possible. You and your family deserve justice.