Corrupt Psychiatric Hospitals In The US From The 1990s | Our Life

[Music] i said i thought this is a free country you know i don't live in nazi germany this is america you can't come in here and just take my job [Music] i think they are a danger to our people they're an insult to our profession and they've been established unequivocally but it's simply a scam to generate enormous money [Music] they didn't treat them like human beings they tried even worse than dogs prisoners had more rights than what we had there [Music] if you have adequate insurance coverage regardless of your mental health needs i assure you that at least the way it's operated in texas the recommendation will be made to admit you into a private psychiatric facility they told me things you know to get me in and once i got in they played along for a few days and then it was like a nightmare [Music] literally hundreds of millions of dollars are hanging here in the balance and the manner in which those profits are are currently being made is effectively by selling uh human beings at their most vulnerable point uh and at precisely the time when those individuals need help the most need assistance the most we have medical professionals and business interests coming in and attempting to abuse the trust that ought to be involved in that relationship solely and exclusively for a profit and greed motive there is a scandal in america private psychiatric hospitals are locking up perfectly sane adults and children against their will purely for profit health care in america is dominated by the free market with some 10 million americans now being treated for drug alcohol and mental health problems psychiatry has become a billion dollar industry and one of the biggest hospital corporations in america has resorted to kidnapping [Applause] i was sitting in my office and uh my partner was the joe science at the time he he got a call from the hospital it was colonial hills and what happened was like when you get a call or something like that you just come over to where i'm at and say we got a case to go on and that's that so we just go well basically i was paid to transport patients from that home to the hospital just do a job and then i don't have a phd or nothing like that ulysses jones worked for sector one a private security company in texas sector one had delivery contracts with private psychiatric hospitals to bring people in on april 12 last year they received orders to pick up a 14 year old san antonio school boy jeremy harrell the price for the job 75 dollars an hour in texas they call them bounty hunters sector one had orders from a doctor who had never even met jeremy harrell well dr bolin asked for jerry my hair to be picked up but they had no idea that he never seen the kid or interviewed him or nothing like that they flashed a badge at me they both had a coat on that just kind of opened their coat were police officers we're here to pick up jeremy i said what'd he do i said they didn't know i looked to jeremy i said what did you do he said i didn't do a thing they did not have a court order they had didn't have any kind of order except dr mark bolen sword and he didn't know what he was talking about because there was nothing wrong with the boy jeremy harrell had no history of mental illness tom they weren't going to take him they said well if he doesn't go voluntarily then we'll go get a court order and uh he'll have to stay up to 28 days if he goes voluntarily only has a state 24 hours well jeremy was upset and he said mom let me go i can take care of myself for 24 hours i said no they need to come in here like the gestapo and take over this a free country and i can do what the heck i want to and they've got no reason to pick you up you didn't do anything i'm trying to think what what i'm supposed to do you know i'm trying to call them you know to get some sense and i i don't know whether to you know just take a chance and and attack and get the whole bunch of us shot or you know you really feel worthless there was nothing we could do to stop them we called the live oak police we called a lawyer they would not talk to the lawyer and the police couldn't do anything either i think they just kidnapped him [Music] colonial hills hospital is located in northwest san antonio over the years it has come to symbolize hope for those who are drawn to its professional caring environment parents are sometimes concerned about bringing their small child or adolescent to a psychiatric hospital let me assure you that this is a place where your child can not only be safe get the kind of help that will bring them out of their emotional difficulties and problems that they've been experiencing at home or at school this is a good place this is a fine place where your child or teenager will be taken care of [Music] colonial hills belongs to one of america's biggest private hospital corporations but the kidnap of jeremy harrell was not an isolated case scott wakoff was trying to save a marriage he found a therapist to help him and his wife sort out their problems i was trying to save a marriage not for my benefit not for my wife's benefit but for my 18 month old baby's benefit he didn't know the therapist had a private contract with colonial hills which last year was worth over thirty six thousand dollars my wife had an appointment with the marital therapist at six o'clock and at eight eight thirty that night when she had not shown up i became quite concerned i called the therapist office to see if she had been in or if indeed when she left around 11 o'clock that night they returned my phone call and told me that my wife was at colonial hills hospital and asked her what that was and she didn't inform me it was a psychiatric hospital and that she had done all she could for my wife what did you think had happened to her i thought she had had a nervous breakdown i couldn't understand why or what was going on i was just basically real concerned for her health what am i supposed to do at this point i've you know i've got a guy babysitting my daughter and i walked into the front area of colonial hills and identified myself security guard came back with a lady who identified herself as a administrator for colonial hills and she asked me to go with her as we walked down the corridor i heard a door shut behind me we proceeded forward went through a set of double doors on the left side and when i went through those doors they stopped the lady turned around with a set of keys and locked the deadbolt on it at this time i still wasn't aware of anything until four other men plus the two security guards came into the lobby area and surrounded me scott wakoff found himself a prisoner i asked where my wife was and she told me that she wasn't there at that time that they had orders by a doctor mark boland to hold me [Applause] they kept me there completely involuntarily the for the full 28 days was involuntarily i called over there after the 24 hours were up nobody would talk to me my husband went over there try to pick him up he could not get in the door he thought we had abandoned him he asked for clothes we couldn't bring him clothes we couldn't they wouldn't let us talk to him on the phone or anything we call over there as far as we were concerned he wasn't even there we had no raids dr boland did sell my life to that hospital for 28 thousand dollars that's all it was worth to them was the amount that the insurance would cover and his portion of it was ten ten thousand dollars working directly with the children is a dedicated caring staff of physicians psychologists occupational and recreational therapists teachers case managers and a large nursing staff that provides quality 24-hour care mark bolan was a fraud colonial hills had employed a man who forged his credentials to obtain a license to practice medicine yes sir i apologize to dr castle mark bolan and colonial hills now face criminal charges for false imprisonment his credentials were not even valid at the time he had falsified his records to the hospital it's the hospital's responsibility to know that he was a proper form that he was practicing right and they did not do that they gave him the ability to bring people in and use his signature and his credentials to hold them there the only thing he saw was dollar signs he didn't care about anything except the money he knew my husband is ex-military retired military we have good insurance and that's the only thing mark bowling cared about what do you think about that what i think about him i think he's lower than whale crap and that's in the bottom of the ocean colonial hills not only needed patience they needed doctors to work the system one of those approached by the hospital's administrator was dr charles arnold they had made a number of doctors very rich and offered to make me rich if i would as he put it go along with the program change my way of thinking and cooperate with him now i asked him to explain this in greater detail which apparently consisted of getting my cooperation and my willingness to approve with my md degree anyone he could find to bring into the hospital it made no difference whether they were sick or ill just wherever they could find people once the person was brought to the hospital i would be required to okay the admission since i have an md degree once that was done that person would be placed in the hospital under my name but i would really not have to do anything because him or he and his treatment team would take over the what's called the program now if i would cooperate with that i could go into each patient each day and say well how are you doing today are they doing okay are you happy here and then i could leave and for that i could send in a bill to the insurance company for 125 dollars a day per patient now this could generate one doctor in houston uh i was told had 30 to 35 people in a hospital there is no way one human being can take care of that many people in a psychiatric a valid ethical psychiatric setting that would generate three thousand dollars a day before you went to the office if i had thirty patients in the hospital that would be approximately ninety thousand dollars to a hundred thousand dollars a month that i could have made my initial reaction was just absolute rage i i was very very angry when he left my office uh it evokes many feelings it's it's hard to think of words to describe this and what troubles me even more is that this is an extremely extremely prevalent practice in the united states today what we thought was a local issue in one city in texas quickly magnified into a statewide scandal and that has expanded nationally i can't say where it began and where it ended as far as the degrees that these hospitals would go to to put someone in those beds but we have seen just about every kind of abuse there is patients who have gone in voluntarily and been locked up against their will patients who have been booted out of the hospital once their insurance expires we've had exorbitant marketing schemes to to pull patients into this vortex that i mentioned and one of those for example is a suicide hotline a 1 800 number which refers you to a 1 900 number which makes two dollars a minute off your call while you're deciding whether or not to take your life hello uh mrs morrissey this is sandy's mother is my daughter there [Music] hello mrs carpenter have you seen sandy hello mrs weller um i'm looking for sandy if someone you love is running away from their problems call laurelwood hospital in the woodlands at 800-999-4435 psychiatrists are in a position of public trust the public assumes that you're trustworthy that you will be honest and ethical and fair now that puts you in a position to abuse and to exploit a patient who trusts you and this is done daily you can see pretty much daily uh psychiatrists and clinics and hospitals advertising and appealing to these fears on television radio the newspapers and so forth and it has become an industry definitely an industry [Music] psychiatric health care is big business it's worth 50 billion dollars a year and it's still growing in the 1980s the numbers of private psychiatric hospitals more than doubled and the greatest growth was in texas [Music] one of the biggest corporate chains with a turnover of more than four billion dollars last year is national medical enterprises and its subsidiary psychiatric institutes of america p i a p i a has the reputation of being one of the most aggressive companies in mental health today i worked for a pia hospital for about two years and for most of that time i was a program director in charge of their day hospital section dr jim hutchison is a child psychologist now working independently in houston the marketing effort at pia is a very high priority they are a business operation they aggressively pursue profit and they make sure that marketing is one of the chief objectives of people who work for them there so i would say marketing is fundamental to the operation of these hospitals you're trying to keep your senses high that means fill the beds the marketing operation is designed exactly to do that the marketing focus was at one meeting on a friday called the marketing rally and it was organized like a pep rally it would last for at least an hour as many people who could be spared from hospital functioning attended that meeting and that was all the program directors and certainly all the senior staff were there it was conducted in a ra ra kind of a way and you had to go get them go get out there and give the good word about this hospital there were prizes awarded for effort and so on i still can't believe what our son's problems did to our family the screaming the fights and everything to do with school was just a nightmare i finally realized we had to find some help i'm on everything okay it sure is if you are trying to deal with the troubled teenager call baywood hospital now at 713-332-9550 and then you have the whole idea that mental health should be for money now those i have no objection to earning some money of course i am a professional i have to earn my living but when you decide that money is the bottom line and it takes it takes away from what brings many of us into mental health in the first place which is a caring concern for people you've gone from trying to put people first to putting the balance sheet first there is a cynical manipulation of people here and it's being done for many reasons only hi kathy everything going all right pretty good thank you i need to get a couple of discharge summaries i need to get one on ruth barber all right and then jared norris okay there you go okay i'll bring him back just move him thank you i've been in healthcare now for 23 years i've got a lot of background [Laughter] i was at psychiatric institute for about a year i took care of such things as all the patient billing and the medical records and and accounts payable payroll and then the financial reporting for the hospital the beauty of the psych hospitals is the fact that you can get into relatively cheap uh psych hospitals such as we had we're looking at a six seven million dollar investment you're looking at a med surg hospital in the same neighborhood you're looking at a 45 million dollar investment the other situation is is you've got a tremendous cash flow the cash flow starts almost immediately we were making in the range of 36 percent profit margin on our operation in health care if you have an eight to ten percent profit margin you're considered a hero so we were doing extremely well were you making too much profit way too much profit we had a little over 670 000 off the books and like i said we were a relatively small hospital in in the pih scheme of things we had made 4.2 million dollars we were scheduled to make 2.7 we made 4.2 we had six hundred and seventy thousand dollars in ghost expenses so yes we made a lot of profit for them the manner in which private psychiatric hospitals conduct their business in texas for the most part is illegitimate and is illegal the attorney general's office in texas is conducting a major investigation into private psychiatric abuse its division chief is joe cruz he is investigating more than 600 separate complaints thank you very much 300 alone on pia this is clearly by far the largest case that we've ever worked on and it it'll take on any given day a third of the resources of the division it's a huge investment of resources but it's the sort of case that requires it bill mr cruz what do you know about uh that brookhaven matter the church connection that we were talking about earlier it's much bigger than anything that that we have done in this office not only my division but the entire office of the attorney general in anyone's memory it is so big that when i first raised this issue nationally with other attorneys general that no one was willing to take it on no one was interested in it because no one has the resources none of the states have the resources to really take these people on so we came back to texas and just decided that we would we would go it on our own and see how we did [Music] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] boy my name is joe cruz i've come here uh today because i understand that you have some information for us and if you could provide me with any information that you feel comfortable in sharing i'd appreciate it okay [Music] i've had 18 major surgeries and almost 45 hours of under the knife in the last three years a surgeon's knife had left roy shannon with no spleen and most of his intestines and bowels removed he was in intense pain in the process he'd become seriously addicted to painkillers and heavy drugs to counter his pain and addiction he was referred to a pia hospital in dallas the telephone conversation that i had with dr leon through brookhaven psychiatric hospital had assured me that he could get me on the roadway recovery he painted a very nice picture but that's not what happened he diagnosed me on the phone as being a manic depressive we found that brookhaven is is probably one of the worst actors in at least in the state we think primarily because of the clientele that they are usually able to attract out there but also because they employ some unusual forms of psychological therapy that are still in testing stages for most of reasonable practitioners their plan for detoxification is they strap you to a bed in leather restraints and what happened uh you're left there i was left that way through the night and they had strapped me during during that time my legs were spread my arms were down to the side of the bed and they were just strapped with a kind of like a leather bands to the bed rails you're left with a bow that has no control as a baby has and it's like staying in dirty diapers you know for through the evening into the night all night into the next day and then your someone comes in and unstraps you and tells you to get up and clean yourself up and let's go to a meeting how is that supposed to take you off drugs i have no idea how that cuts you from drugs uh i mean they restrain you and restrict you there's uh it's like a cold turkey type thing i felt dejected and rejected i felt hurt abused it's a tough world out there [Music] sometimes it feels like everybody's gunning for you it seems like no matter where you hide trouble's not far behind caught in the crossfire of life call us directions a mental health referral service 777-7100 we'll connect you with a professional who can help because in this life everyone needs reinforcement directions call us did you have any coverage at all um when you were first admitted that's the only way i got in they're showing double charges if you look this up there are the dates uh detoxification and the bedtimes so you've got 13 days there were you in the program yes yes my insurance would cover up to fifty thousand dollars when needed for a psychiatric and detoxification program if it could be proven that at the end of the fifty thousand that it could be transferred over into the medical then it would it could continue to pay with no maximums at the end of the six weeks period that i had been there when they found out that my insurance would definitely not transfer it from psychiatric to medical then they all of a sudden were ready to release me and they did release me i was in the hospital for basically 28 days and until all of a sudden a miraculous recovery occurred and the insurance ran out from day one the planned discharge date would tie to when their insurance benefits would would run out in a lot of cases and how often did that happen everybody that had a limit on their insurance policy if you had unlimited benefits and we'd keep you longer texas is the first state to hold senate hearings into private psychiatric hospital abuse nine other states are planning similar investigations the senate interim committee on health and human services will please come to order members uh this is the third in a series of work sessions in the committee to uh to consider and adopt appropriate remedies to address the myriad of problems that we have identified involving private psychiatric and substance abuse services we still have plenty of work ahead of us so let's get started in the course of the committee's investigation the members have heard repeated allegations of outright fraud on the part of health care providers 12 hours of dance therapy in a single day you know all kinds of abuses like that and of course uh the problem is not just uh restricted to substance abuse or mental health treatment it seems to be endemic to health care in in general i believe that there are people from the department of insurance are that are prepared to address this directly i think it would be a fair statement to say there is a lot of fraud out there the area of health care claims fraud is rife with abuse it is rife with instances of double billings over billings rebates which are illegal returns of premiums uh actual rings of people who are engaged in fraudulent activity and who are doing that on a planned an extent very extensive basis and of course it's driving everybody's health premiums up fraud in mental health care claims is estimated to cost the united states over five billion dollars a year normally if a person needs a psychotherapy or discussion of problems and so forth i would say an absolute maximum on an isolated day would be two hours normally no more than an hour in one day now i have seen cases and reviewed them where 10 12 14 hours of therapy so-called was given in one day and this has included people who were in a coma people who had dementia and by definition could not remember what they talked about the following day they would give as many therapy types a day as they could and these include such things as what are called therapeutic walks if you go for a walk that's therapy you can charge forty dollars for that art therapy psychodrama cognitive therapy group therapy multi-group therapy family therapy individual therapy it's endless music therapy play the guitar sing a song talk about it and charge forty dollars for therapy it's really important is that all your goals are written down and you will be held accountable for them and lillian what's your goal for today well i tell you what my goal was after i talked to dr bailey when he sat with me at the table and we talked everything he said lynn i'm gonna see if you can't go home towards the weekend i said that sounds good so i thought to myself i ought to be real sweet to all these people here no that's what my mother always said if you go out anywhere i could go a lot of times she said don't you be ugly you'd be sweet to everybody if you like them or not so that's my goal for today wonderful good that's real good i'm glad to hear that okay mugsy what's your goal for today i'm gonna not sleep so much and be more active good good for you a lot of parents don't know their teenager is headed for trouble until the school tells them they have no idea how much trouble he's really in until school gets out they hope the problem will get better over the summer until it gets worse the truth is some parents don't want to believe there's a problem at all until there's no solution don't let your teenager waste another school year specialized care just for kids clearly the thing that's affected me the most is the way that this industry has insidiously gotten itself involved with children and they do so in a variety in a variety of ways the most blatant example is the way that psychiatric facilities in texas have obtained a presence in school counseling facilities in independent school districts throughout the state and it's such an insidious way for them to get get business that is through the school districts and by way of preying on minors that's the thing that really troubles me the most psychiatric hospitals place their own counsellors in american schools in texas investigations are now underway in 24 school districts for illegal referrals to their hospitals when we started admitting children as young as two and three years of age that just that gets you a little bit then the adolescent program it was easy to admit those patients and they we knew they were going to stay for a long time and they had no say in the admission so they'd be there for 60 to 90 days we've seen uh the referrals being made by school counselors um people that that uh as we grow up in life we've we've been taught to put our trust in and instead many many times our schools become pipelines for our students into these private hospitals and sometimes if possible in many cases we heard where that was used to to pull not just the child in but the parents as well be careful now dupreeh had just had her fourth birthday when she was referred for a consultation at laurelwood a pia hospital in houston get up there i don't you can't do it you did it okay you better come down her mother laisha suspected the child had been sexually abused pia persuaded her that quarticia needed immediate hospitalization they suggested she stay with the child for four days to keep her company after the four days were up i was ready to go and they were trying to keep me there i kept saying hey i want to get out of here you know it's my time is up and she kept saying that no i really think it's something inside you that's wanting to come out and will come out and it's going to be a nasty sight you know and i'm like i don't care you know even if so i'm ready to go and you know they just refused and refused and refused so at that time i decided to start saying hey i'm not going to pay insurance the hospital's attitude towards laisha changed they separated her from her child until one evening she was summoned to the children's unit next thing i know she said grab her and i got this guy before i couldn't even turn my head he grabbed me and and then the guy that called me to have me to come over there from the beginning he comes out you know finally and he say strap and it's like they went around the corner to get this you know the strap and it's like everything was just set up because it took them less than a you know second to grab me and less than you know maybe two or three seconds to get the strap and he took his knees the guy that was holding me took his knees and bitten my knees in and brought me down to the floor and he like stumbled you know fell on top of me when i kind of started going off then i was like what are you doing to me you know let me go let me go and my daughter was standing there the whole time watching everything and that's when i said to them just please get her out of here don't let her see this you know and she was just up there crying and it hurt me for her to have to see me being treated that way hospital records show that pia asked four-year-old quarticia whether she'd ever thought of suicide i was so desperate i called the police department that's when i got a hold of chief cantu well it was a saturday and i had come in to do some extra work and the phone rang and i answered it and it was a woman requesting assistance that she was being detained against her will in the hospital and that she was not a patient there i guess when you're in a mental hospital whatever the hospital it was people aren't going to listen to you because they don't think you're crazy but you know that's not really the case i went in there with the intention of trying to do a constructive investigation i felt that leicester was telling me the truth this other gentleman i felt that he was holding back he wasn't being cooperative he wasn't giving me the information i needed evasive and finally i felt that he was playing games with me and i wasn't going to put up with him she told me right there in front of him she wanted to be let out and i asked him i said are you going to let her out and he said no i said well we'll see about that i came back to my office i started making some phone calls to some judges and state representatives and i got a phone call within about two hours that they had decided to let her go there is so much evidence in this situation i mean setting aside any anecdotal testimony from any witness out there from anybody who's been in one of these facilities the evidence as to how the system operates in and of itself is illegal i mean it's inherently evil in the manner in which this this business is conducted that's the problem now over and above that all of the testimony that we've received that the senate committee has received and all the other government agencies that are investigating this have received reflect a consistent pattern as to how people have been abused and it's particularly horrible because the people that are being taken advantage of here are people who do have problems a person can be committed into a psychiatric hospital too easily all you need is is a one normal person to contact the judge and say this person is not normal you know the behavior of this person is strange uh the judge all the judge has to do is believe that person the order is signed and you're put in a hospital and once you go in there it is extremely hard to get out in the private psychiatric boom of the 1980s hospital corporations exploited widespread deregulation of health care to build wherever they wanted and they took advantage of policies that finance treatment for mental health drug and alcohol problems and for victims of crime beginning in the late 70s in this country there was a sense of deregulation being good for the economy and for business and a variety of other factors all of which when when combined result in basically an open market no regulation uh in in an industry that has very low capital cost in terms of getting in and getting buildings built and these facilities established and there just aren't any watchdogs i think the absence of the state's presence has a great deal to to do with it we have allowed the the private sector to seek its own level we haven't monitored the construction of of hospital facilities and they've basically been allowed to charge what the market will bear and to build what the market will bear as well it's my understanding that many of the same providers that are operating here in texas and in the united states are also setting up shop and in operation in england and i just hope that you can learn by what we are doing here to uh to put the mechanisms in place to provide the protection to the citizens of of england and and get your guard up where you can where you can be aware that these abuses can and will occur under threat in america u.s hospital corporations are actively exploring opportunities overseas they have targeted britain for major expansion in the nineteen nineties three of them are already in the country in britain pia's parent company national medical enterprises aims to have over 50 long-term care facilities by 1993. in the state capital the attorney general's team is finalizing its investigation it's a long document it's very comprehensive but it's also very fair and rational and it took us four or five lawyers five weeks almost night and day to put this thing together because many of these issues are very complicated technical kind of medical issues the bottom line is that we are currently negotiating a settlement agreement with national medical enterprises our lawyers are very tenacious our investigators are very tenacious they have been involved in this investigation now i suppose for the better part of a year and they take this very very seriously and very very personally and i think with with good cause i take it personally as well this is an extremely egregious violation that has occurred and it is it is one that cries out uh for aggressive and vigorous uh response and if we can't put together a settlement agreement that i believe is in the public interest we will not hesitate to go to court and litigate this matter the way we're going to clean it up is we're going to stay on them legally we're going to sue them and if we lose this case we'll sue somebody else we'll sue under a different theory and we're just this thing stinks it's illegal and we're going to find a way to run them out of business national medical enterprises has now reached a settlement with the texas attorney general they agreed to pay out over nine million dollars in compensation [Applause] nme has announced the closure of both colonial hills and laurelwood hospitals but while they still face investigations by the fbi department of defense and the u.s congress they remain in the psychiatric business nme refused to take part in this [Music] programme [Music] [Music] the biggest loss of so far has been my daughter i lost contact with my daughter through it when i the day before i was released from colonial hills my ex-wife filed divorce when i came back to the house my house was empty and my daughter's stuff was all gone the divorce took quite some time to dr bolin testified against me in my divorce and testified of what a horrible person i could be and the judge basically took in his credentials and his credibility into account and i was restricted visitation of my daughter my ex-wife has moved out of the state and has taken my daughter with her and i have not been able to bring her back home [Music] i personally feel strongly about it because it is destroying the credibility the honor the respect the trust that people have in my profession and this is my life and i take it very personal it's very destructive it destroys that and it destroys the people in the long run and that get [Music] [Music] involved it's it's hard to describe it's just just unbelievable anything i to this day i really can't believe it happened but it did and it just tore our whole family apart [Music] [Music] i'm still angry you know uh and i'll always be angry and be bitter about it but there's nothing that i can do about it there's no one out there that would believe you know back then what i had to say and now it's too late [Music] [Music] you

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Published: Sun Apr 04 2021