Pontiac’s balance sheet, which reveals that the privately owned facility owes as many as 99 creditors as much as $10 million, is an admission that it cannot continue to function on its own merits—however you want to interpret that word in the context of psychiatric abuse—without being propped up by government funds.
Pontiac may foreshadow what’s in store for the others.
The federal report from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) following their own investigation of the facility detailed incidents of abuse, violence and, in one case, preventable death, prompting CMS to take the money teat away from Pontiac’s mouth.
Just one of a flood of psychiatric institutions whose grimy underbelly of abuse-masquerading-as-help has been exposed in recent months, Pontiac may foreshadow what’s in store for the others.
The facilities whose human rights violations Freedom has recently laid bare are far apart geographically—in locations ranging from DC to Michigan. They run the gamut, from for-profit organizations to privately owned to state-run. They include institutions that are part of a huge conglomerate of associated mental health facilities—like the mammoth Universal Health Services, which boasts more than 400 such facilities under its umbrella—and stand-alone institutions like the maximum-security Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center.
No matter their differences, however, they all have one thing in common: abuse. That abuse is ugly and so common as to simply be part of the essence of what it is to be a psychiatric facility, even though it may not be mentioned in the lovely brochures.
Pontiac’s bankruptcy may be the first tolling of the bell that signals the end of psychiatry’s reign of institutional terror.
What facility will be the next domino to fall?
Whatever the answer, it can’t happen quickly enough.
