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Friday, February 6, 2009

Abuse Found at NY Psychiatric Hospital

From the NY Times:

After a yearlong investigation, the Department of Justice portrayed the unit at Kings County Hospital Center as a nightmarish place where patients were not treated for suicidal behavior, were routinely subdued with physical restraints and drugs instead of receiving individualized psychiatric treatment, and were frequently abused by other patients.

........

The investigators found that the psychiatric service operated like a prison. The report said that instead of meaningful treatment and diagnosis, the patients received frequent visual checks by the staff, and that even when patients were supposedly under watch, violence and attempted suicides occurred.

4 comments:

Dream Mom said...

This type of behavior is horrific and needs to stop. I worry about how we are treating other human beings. This is not right.

Thank you, as always, for being such a great advocate and bringing these stories to our attention.

Ruth said...

Yes, I worry about it too.

Thank you for the blogging you do - I learn much from your writings.

LetRVoiceBHeard said...

This sort of thing is terrible. Why are these people in this sort of business when it's obvious that they don't care about the patients.

Unfortunately this is just the tip of the iceburg as there are more and more facilities out there that are doing the same thing or even worse if that's possible.

Penelope said...

This is horrid, although what disturbed me more was the "changes" they were making. I'm still not sure how security (whether non uniformed and trained in crisis interventions or uniformed hospital guards) are supposed to be "screening emergency-room admissions". I'm really hoping it was an example of shoddy writing by the NYT and not really what they meant, especially as I would think it would be against some sort of health & safety sort of thing to have screening done by non-medical personnel. It sounds to me like putting a different face on doing the same thing, rather than actually making a real change. This makes me worried that that's really just what's going to happen throughout the hospital rather than anything getting any better.