Mom seeks understanding in deadly attack

STANDISH – Two months after her son was charged with stabbing her husband to death without warning or provocation, a Standish woman is seeking understanding on how she could have missed the signs that her son was headed for a crisis.

Cathleen and Donald McKay thought their 21-year-old son Kristian was on the road to recovery after suffering a pair of mental breakdowns. But on March 3, those hopeful feelings were erased by what Cathleen McKay now calls “the darkness.”

That was when Kristian walked across the kitchen of their Standish home and allegedly killed his father in a sudden knife attack that has eluded explanation.

Cathleen McKay is now asking whether doctors could have shared more information about her son’s condition after he stopped taking his medication and going to counseling.

“The families of people who have these illnesses need to be better educated,” Cathleen McKay told the Maine Sunday Telegram. “We’re not trained. I wish that if there was something some doctor could have told us, he would have called.”

Kristian McKay, who is charged with murder, was the youngest of four boys in the McKay family. A judge has ordered him sent to the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta for observation and treatment, but he’s waiting in jail for a bed to become available.

McKay showed no signs of mental illness until his freshman year at the University of New Hampshire after his 2004 graduation from Plymouth High School in New Hampshire.

After the end of the fall term, he was hospitalized and treated for severe depression and anxiety with psychosis. Cathleen McKay was told that depression was epidemic among college students and that her son would recover fully.

He dropped out of school, found work in construction and got an apartment with a friend, but almost a year later he had a second breakdown – more serious than the first.

Cathleen McKay was afraid her son might kill himself, but she said he never acted violently or threatened anyone.

By January this year, Kristian had moved into his parents’ house in Standish, where they had moved a couple of years earlier to be closer to another son.

Kristian was busy helping his father with home improvements, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity and looking for work in construction. To his parents, he looked like he was getting better.

“He was alive, involved, and there was no reason to believe that there was anything that would happen,” Cathleen McKay said.

But Kristian had also stopped taking his medication and going to counseling.

He was in contact with a Marine recruiter who told him that he would have to be off medication for more than a year to be eligible for service, his mother said. But she doesn’t know if that’s why he stopped, because he also said he was “tired of feeling like a zombie.”

Now she wonders if her son’s doctors could have warned her that he might be putting himself under too much stress. But the information doctors can share with a patient’s family is tightly governed by state and federal laws.

A mental-health provider who believes there is imminent threat is required to break confidentiality. But if there is only a sense that a patient is making risky choices, the doctor need communicate that only to the patient.

On Thursday, the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee held a hearing on a bill that would weaken confidentiality protections to give families more information.

Many professionals already find ways to work with families, said Dr. Carlyle Voss, a forensic psychiatrist in Portland who has not been involved in Kristian McKay’s treatment.

But when there is no basis to believe violence is imminent, a doctor cannot violate confidentiality if someone decides to stop taking medication, Voss said.