New York Times exposé on unethical practices in a chain of psychiatric hospitals prompts mental health industry watchdog to push for the removal of involuntary commitment accreditation from abusive facilities and urges victims to come forward.

LOS ANGELES - Sept. 6, 2024 - PRLog -- A ground-breaking New York Times investigation found a major national chain of behavioral hospitals has lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will until their insurance ran out.[1] Since 2015, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a mental health industry watchdog has had the company's behavioral facilities under scrutiny for patient abuse, filing tens of thousands of complaints to legislators about alleged unscrupulous practices.

In light of the Times findings—vindicating CCHR's concerns—CCHR wants hospitals that detain patients against their will for profit to be stripped of any license they may have to receive patients to involuntarily commit them. For example, the Florida Administrative Code allows hospitals to obtain a license and be a designated "receiving facility" to involuntarily commit patients under the state's Baker Act.

The Times pointed out that in Florida, hospitals can hold people for 72 hours unless the patients agree to stay longer or a judge or a medical professional determines that they are not ready to leave. Citing a North Tampa behavioral health hospital as an example, the facility was able to exploit this and filed more than 4,500 petitions to extend patients' involuntary stays.

CCHR Florida has been exposing this for many years, and CCHR International has warned of similar abusive practices in other states. The Times also found that in at least 12 of the 19 states where the hospital chain had hospitals, dozens of patients, employees and police officers have alerted the authorities that the company was detaining people in ways that violated the law. In some cases, judges have intervened to force the hospital chain to release patients.

On 12 June 2024, the U.S. Senate Finance Committee released the findings of its two-year investigation into the hospital chain and three others. Their report, "Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abuse in Youth Residential Treatment Facilities," mirrored what CCRCHHRHR Int has been reporting for a decade and aligns with the findings of the New York Times investigation. According to the Senate report, "The harms, abuses, and indignities children in [RTFs] have experienced and continue to experience today occur inevitably and by design: they are the direct causal result of a business model that has incentive to treat children as payouts and provide less than adequate safety and behavioral health treatment in order to maximize operating and profit margin." Further, "Providers will continue to operate this model because it's good business, unless there is some bold intervention."[2]

As part of that necessary intervention, CCHR launched a new public service announcement to help people abused in behavioral facilities to seek recompense. It calls for people who have been abused in such facilities, held against their will or whistleblowers who have "insider information about such abuse," to report this to CCHR.

Other practices The Times found which could be reported to CCHR include:

• Patient symptoms exaggerated and medication dosages tweaked, then claims made that patients needed to stay longer because of the adjustment.
• Holding people who had voluntarily checked themselves in but then changed their minds, or holding them until their insurance runs out.
• Patients or their families needing to hire lawyers to get them released.
• Patients sexually or physically abused, bruised, assaulted or neglected.