Citizens Commission on Human Rights

Abuses In Institutions

With billions in government appropriations allocated for mental health treatment, just how safe and effective are psychiatric institutions? The following cases illustrate the dangers of a system that lacks scientific understanding of causes of mental health problems, with subsequent lack of workable remedies and the terrible consequences of this.

 
On April 12, 1991, 14-year-old Jeramy Harrel was with his grandmother when a patrol car pulled up beside them, and two hulking uniformed men who appeared to be police officers announced that they were taking Jeramy to Colonial Hills Psychiatric Hospital. They said that psychiatrist Dr. Mark Bowlan and a child welfare agent—who had never spoken with Jeramy or his parents—had filled in an application for the boy’s detention, claiming he was a “substance abuser” and that his grandparents had physically abused him. The psychiatrist also stated that Jeramy was “truant from school, failing grades, violent [and] aggressive,” and was “likely to cause serious harm to self.” It took the efforts of Texas State Senator Frank Tejeda to finally obtain Jeramy’s release from the hospital after he had discovered the boy’s admission was based on the unsubstantiated and untrue comments made by Jeramy’s 12-year-old brother, Jason. The family’s health insurance was billed $11,000 for this fraudulent “admission” and “treatment.”

In 2001, a psychiatric nurse found a 53-year-old man unresponsive 12 hours after he had been medicated for “hostile, cursing behavior.” The man died within hours. An autopsy revealed that he suffered from multiple sclerosis (MS). Hospital staff thought “MS” on his admission form meant “mental status.”

Carl McCloskey says his son, John, 19, was sodomized with a broom-like handle so savagely in a psychiatric hospital that his bowel was torn and his liver was punctured. The teenager became violently ill, lapsed into a coma, and died 14 months later.

Seventeen-year-old Kelly Stafford agreed to enter a psychiatric facility expecting a brief respite from troubled family relationships. But once the door was closed, she was kept for 309 days, many of them behind blackened windows in cruel darkness. Her arms and legs were strapped for months at a time. Others in the facility were forced to sit motionless and silent for 12-hour stretches. “I had to eat Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner in restraints,” Ms. Stafford said. “There’s not a day that goes by that you don’t think about it.”

In 2003, Dr. Masami Houki, head of Houki psychiatric clinic in Japan, was charged with manslaughter after he plugged the mouth of a 31-year-old female patient with tissue, put adhesive tape over her mouth, injected her with a tranquilizer, tied her hands and feet, and forced her to lay on the back seat of a car while being transferred to the clinic. She was dead on arrival.

In Athens, Greece, the Ntaou Pendeli psychiatric institution kept children in a ward with mentally handicapped adults. Some of the children were naked; all were housed in cold, barren rooms and often left to lie in their own feces and urine. A teenager had been locked up for 10 years after he misbehaved when his father left his mother for another woman. He witnessed horrors such as the rape of other children by psychiatric nurses.

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