Officials are investigating the suicide of a 13-year-old girl Friday evening at the Brattleboro Retreat.
The girl, whose name hasn’t been released, was a patient in the psychiatric hospital’s Adolescent Residential Program. She was living at a group home adjacent to the hospital.
Retreat Vice President Peter Albert described the group home as a "less intense clinical setting" than the hospital’s inpatient programs.
“It’s a smaller setting of five or six adolescents with staff,” Albert explained. “The doors are not locked. There’s a greater level of freedom because the concern about immediate harm is not there the way it is on an inpatient unit. So this is a 'step down' facility where people do have more freedoms. And the goal is to reunite them with their families or work with state agencies to get a community placement.”
Albert said police have been at the hospital investigating and conducting interviews with staff. The state Division of Child and Family Services, which licenses residential homes, is also at the hospital investigating the death.
This is the third suicide at the Retreat in two years. A woman in an outpatient program took her own life in September. An overdose on an inpatient unit in 2012 led to an investigation in which the hospital narrowly escaped losing its Medicare and Medicaid certification.
Alpert said he doesn’t know whether the young girl’s suicide could lead to similar problems for the hospital. He said the focus now is helping the girl’s family and fellow patients cope with the tragedy, and on supporting the investigation.
