America’s Psychiatric Hospitals: Exploitation for Profit

Robert Carter/September 12, 2024

     Acadia Healthcare, one of the largest chains of psychiatric hospitals in America, has been “luring patients into its facilities and holding them against their will” in order to increase and extend insurance profits, the New York Times has just reported.

     Acadia charges insurance $2200 per day for some of its in-house services. Its profits have doubled since Covid by keeping patients in its facilities “with no excuses or valid reason,” the report said.

     The Times cited the case of one social worker who had to spend six days in an Arcadia psychiatric hospital after she had only come in to get her psychotropic bipolar medication dose adjusted. Another person, an employee at a local Indiana children’s hospital, was held for seven days at an Acadia psychiatric facility after coming there only to get therapy.

     Acadia is accused of holding people against their will by misusing laws only meant to protect patients from self-harm. Acadia employees enforce psychiatric incarceration for these “patients,” and afterward they exaggerate or falsify their conditions in order to increase greater insurance compensation and keep them until their insurance runs out. In twelve states where Arcadia operates psychiatric hospitals, its patients, Acadia employees and even police officers have reported that Acadia has been detaining people through means that violate the law.

     This is not the first time Acadia has run into trouble with the law for its psychiatric facility practices.

     In May, 2019, in Charleston, West Virginia, Acadia settled with state and federal authorities to pay out $17 million to resolve allegations against the company’s fraudulent billing that defrauded Medicaid of $8.5 million.

     In another 2019 lawsuit filed against Acadia, a New Mexico jury awarded a judgment of $485 million — including $250 million in punitive damages against Acadia — for negligence in an eight year old girl’s foster care case. The jury found that Acadia, through one of its Familyworks, Inc. subsidiaries, had placed the foster child in the home of a man they knew had been “sexually abusing and sexually assaulting foster children placed in his care.” The lawsuit stated that this foster care father then repeatedly raped the young girl after she was placed in his home.

     Later that year the New Mexico Desert Hill Acadia facility responsible for the girl’s welfare was shut down after further accusations were made that the staff there had been instigating “fight clubs” with the children and had been sexually abusing them. That year, too, an Acadia facility in Montana was discovered to have been using drug injections as punishment for the children under its care.

     Acadia’s psychiatric facilities are not alone in these criminally abusive activities. There are
currently over 800 psychiatric hospitals in America and apparently many of them are exploiting their patients for profit.

      A joint US Senate Committee report that was just released in June, 2024 accused four of the largest behavioral healthcare companies in America of putting profit above the safety and treatment of children placed in their care.  Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health, Vivant Behavioral Healthcare, Universal Health Services and, yes, Acadia Healthcare are all listed in their scathing report, “Warehouses of Neglect: How Taxpayers Are Funding Systemic Abuse
in Youth Residential Treatment Facilities.”

      The report lists fourteen major types of abuse in these facilities which investigators found in their two year study. For example, four of those state that “Children suffer routine harm inside Residential Treatment Facilities. These harms include sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, unsafe and unsanitary conditions, and inadequate provision of behavioral health treatment; the risk of harm to children in RTFs is endemic to the operating model; children inside RTFs often do not get the treatment they need for mental and behavioral health needs, despite RTFs being reimbursed to provide intensive services; horrific instances of sexual abuse persist unremediated inside RTFs.”

      Enough said.

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