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CASE
REPORTS Abused 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 a subsequent lack of
workable remedies and the terrible consequences that result.
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). Facility staff thought �MS� on his admission form meant
�mental status.�
Carl McCloskey says
his son, John, 19, was sodomized with a
broom-like handle in a psychiatric hospital, tearing his bowel
and puncturing his liver. 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 spent behind
blackened windows in 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, 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 and adhesive tape, injected her with a
tranquilizer, tied her hands and feet, and forced
her to lie 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 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.
An 8-year-old from Massachusetts,
who suffered from epilepsy, was rushed by his parents to the hospital for a
medication adjustment after he experienced hallucinations. Instead of adjusting
his medication, staff committed him to a
psychiatric facility. It took the frantic parents an entire day to secure his
transfer to a medical hospital for appropriate care.
Dana Davis was slammed
face down on his living room floor and handcuffed by police before his horrified
wife and 6 year old son. This occurred after he walked out of
the office of a psychiatrist he didn�t like.
As he was leaving, she asked, �Can you
promise you will not commit suicide between
now and our next meeting?� Jokingly he quipped,
�I�m no soothsayer!� Thirty minutes later, the
three police officers were taking him to
the hospital where he was found not
suicidal and released.
A psychiatrist
committed Ruchla �Rose� Zinger, a 64-year-old
Holocaust survivor with an understandable history of mental
instability, to an institution. The psychiatrist relied solely on reports by
family members. To carry out the involuntary
commitment, police broke down the door to her house, handcuffed her and shoved
her down the stairs. She suffered a heart attack and died.
In 1999, psychiatrists
in Germany involuntarily committed a 79-year-old
woman because neighbors reported she had acted
�strangely.� Despite her long-term diabetes and
liver, kidney and heart conditions, she
was prescribed between five and 20 times the normal dosage of powerful
tranquilizers. Six days later the woman had
to be rushed to a hospital emergency room,
where she died. Doctors reported she had needed urgent medical
attention at least a day earlier and the autopsy showed that she died of
breathing difficulties�a complication of tranquilizers.
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