The rap sheet is ugly. In early April, a patient died while restrained. Once the 41-year-old male went motionless after being held down by an employee using his knee, elbow and chest, attendants waited several minutes before administering CPR, then another 13 before using a defibrillator. The man was pronounced dead after EMS took him to another hospital.
Another patient, a 23-year-old female, could only cry on the phone when she was finally, after nearly a week, permitted to call her mother.
“I’m like, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘They just jumped on me,’” Lakeshia, the mother, said.
“I said, ‘Who jumped on you?’ And she says, ‘An employee.’”
Lakeshia filed a police report about the assault with the county sheriff’s office.
“It’s pretty clear that patients are not getting appropriate treatment, and patients are getting abused.”
Another went to her family doctor to get her antidepressant refilled, only to be hospitalized at the facility for nine days against her will.
“I think about it every single day,” she said. “I just wanted to get help. And what I got was not help.”
She was not the only one. Other patients alleged they were involuntarily held and provided no assistance or were coerced into getting treatment they did not want or need. Some, instead of therapy, received abuse on the part of staff.
After filing a 33-page report following their own investigation of the facility, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that, as of November 24, Pontiac General Hospital’s participation in the Medicare program would be terminated.
That means Pontiac is no longer regarded as a viable option for those seeking care, and patients will no longer be reimbursed through Medicare for “treatment” at the facility.
Simon Zagata, director of the Community and Institutional Rights Team at Disability Rights Michigan, said that his group began their own investigation into Pontiac General and two additional psychiatric facilities—Stonecrest Center and Harbor Oaks—following a local news report on Pontiac.
“It’s pretty clear that patients are not getting appropriate treatment, and patients are getting abused,” Zagata said. “No money, but especially federal money, should be going to pay for treatment that results in that.”
The catalog of crimes committed in the name of help at psychiatric institutions continues to lengthen. Just within the past year, a partial list of offenders includes: Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center; the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, DC; Palmetto Summerville Behavioral Health; the Pavilion Behavioral Health System; and Cumberland Children’s Hospital.
The abuses are characterized by words like “rape,” “violence,” “bloody,” “neglect,” “filthy”—and possibly the eeriest of all: “No report was ever filed on the abuse.”
Like a frustrated child destroying his toys, psychiatry, a bogus profit-making scam, is lashing out in a temper against those it pretends to help.
It’s an implosion that was predictable, but no less heart-rending to its victims.
