For-profit healthcare makes this outcome inevitable.
This is not really even about that because yes, people are being held in these places involuntarily, but a lot of people voluntarily check themselves in- Acadia even works on propaganda to get them to do it- and then can’t leave. People who want things like an evaluation for bipolar disorder or an adjustment in medication or just plain old therapy.
They were tricked into going there. You seem to be missing that. That isn’t legal. Most of the things in the article aren’t legal.
In my town at least, we’ve got it right, that is if we could get more funding and help everyone.
The system that I went through has tiers, and it’s mostly drug addicts, but man I’ve seen it turn people around completely.
If a person ends up arrested because they’re tweaking, paperwork is immediately filed to get them into a specialized local hospital. It’s very small, but the people involved really do work hard to get things moving.
Once the person is in the hospital, they keep them until withdrawal ends or psychosis subsides. Then they enroll them in a very strenuous program that pretty much takes up their entire life for a bit. They try to get the person on Medicaid, but if they don’t qualify the hospital actually has a fund to pay for their treatment. They are provided with a ride to drug classes and group therapy multiple times a week and drug tested daily. If they fail a drug test they take them back to the hospital, unless they’ve been charged criminally, then it’s back to jail first, but ultimately they’ll end up back in the hospital.
Assigned case managers will visit them at their home at random daily. If the person doesn’t have a home, we have several “sobriety houses” in the area where folks are sent until they can get on their own feet.
Their case worker files applications for low income apartments and other programs like HUD. The person will ultimately end up in a home if they work the program.
In my time with the program I seen way more success than failure. The only failures I seen were those people who just made criminality their entire life. I’m talking drug dealing, robbing, constantly fighting. There are some people you just can’t help. I might be wrong there, but I seen a personality type that didn’t seem like it could be helped anyway. It was those folks who found their source of pride in a criminal lifestyle.
I probably do have some bias on the success of the program because they stick you with people who have progress similar to yours. If you’re a success in the program, you’re generally going to have appointments scheduled alongside people who are doing at least roughly as good as you are.
When I left the main program in 2020, I always had my appointments with the same people. We were the “no failed drug tests in years” group. Several of those people were homeless but they aren’t now.
Here in the UK there was a former inpatient who was released during Thatchers deinstitutionalization in 80s and within weeks he killed his doctor.
Chain of Psychiatric Hospitals
Stop the planet I want off
This whole article is horrific. (And wasn’t paywalled to me)
It goes beyond trapping patients. We’re talking things like beating children and multiple rapes.
The NYT operates on a limited-article basis, making it so you have maybe three articles a month before getting the boot.
If you ever need to bypass this, there’s an extension for Firefox, and additionally, there’s archive.ph or one of its sister sites like archive.vn and archive.is (they all feed into and read from the same underlying database).
I used to work for a nonprofit psych hospital in a city where there’s also an Acadia hospital. We hired a ton of their staff who started working there well-intentioned but quickly fled after they witnessed how it was run. Patients would tell us horror stories and tell us how grateful they were they didn’t end up there. We’d see patients who discharged from there just a few days prior who were still psychotic as fuck, and we’d treat them ethically and they’d actually get better. They’d leave the Acadia hospital with basically no discharge plan, a lot of times their families weren’t even told where they’d been released to or that they’d been released at all.
I spent a few years repairing medical equipment in halfway homes, psychiatric institutions, and nursing homes. All for low income people. I am definitely going to die before I ever end up in one of those shitholes. Literal hell on earth all of them. People screaming pointlessly for attention or pain relief into hallways populated only with jaded and underpaid Nigerian woman who can barely keep up because they are so understaffed.
