An Agonizing Battle With Schizophrenia Ends In A Tragic Death
Frank Campos’ childhood bedroom still overflows with art: dark charcoal portraits, kinetic abstracts and mixed media sculptures that look like miniature cities.
The artifacts tell his story in fragments: a smiling kid on a middle school ID card. Family photos from Yosemite peeking out of a wooden box of his keepsakes.
“There’s so much: He sketched, he wrote. He wrote for hours and hours,” said his mother, Kathrynne Campos-Gil.
There’s no clear sign of when and where it would all end.
On Feb. 22, 2021, Campos jumped out of the back seat of an SUV into speeding traffic on the 5 Freeway. After walking through lanes of cars streaking past him, a commercial truck struck him, and he died at the scene.
He was 29.
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Campos’ death marked an excruciating end to his family’s years-long battle with schizophrenia. They’d tried several doctors, different facilities and numerous medications, but his serious mental illness continued to plague him, family members said.
It’s a struggle many patients and families across California deal with day in and day out: One out of every 26 adults in California live with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia.
Yet doctors and affected family members say the mental health care system continues to fail the sickest people — people like Frank Campos, who are tormented by psychosis. The failures are both specific and systemic, and there is no easy solution.
More broadly, experts point to a dire shortage of psychiatric beds as well as financial pressures to release and move patients, compounding an intractable problem that too often has deadly outcomes.
A wrongful death lawsuit the Campos family’s attorney filed in April 2022 alleges…
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