“We’re here to help you. Our goal is to provide a stabilizing, healing environment.”
—Psychiatric Institute of Washington, DC
A 17-year-old is forced to repeatedly perform sexual acts.
A fight breaks out among inmates, requiring seven police officers to quell it. One youth is stabbed in the cheek and sustains a facial fracture, while another suffers nasal fractures and a laceration.
Where is this violence and torture happening? Some back alley in a third-world country? Some misbegotten crime-infested neighborhood? Or possibly it’s a scene from a movie depicting a sick dystopian future where no one is safe?
No, the site of these incidents—and more—are the corridors and rooms of the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, DC (PIW), the city’s only for-profit mental hospital. As revealed by a Disability Rights DC investigation into PIW, there is “a disturbing long-standing pattern of abuse and neglect” at what masquerades as a place of succor and balm.
“There are bugs, abuse, dangerously low staffing levels, violent fights and blood and vomit smeared throughout the building.”
Shockingly, PIW is not an isolated example of psychiatrists’ egregious abuse and neglect of mental patients. As with other psychiatric institutions, violence, rape and chaos are the norm—not the exception. PIW is one of more than 400 for-profit healthcare facilities owned by Universal Health Services (UHS), itself one of the largest behavioral healthcare conglomerates in America. UHS handles over 3.6 million patients yearly with revenues exceeding $14 billion in 2023, and has been the subject of repeated investigations and lawsuits, all variations of the same themes: abuse, neglect and flouting of federal and state regulations.
In November 2023, Katie Kamin of Live 5 News in Charleston, South Carolina, reported that there were dozens of complaints filed against the local UHS youth treatment center alleging “there are bugs, abuse, dangerously low staffing levels, violent fights and blood and vomit smeared throughout the building.” In March of this year, a jury found that a UHS behavioral health facility in Champaign, Illinois, failed to safely house patients, provide adequate staffing or properly monitor its adolescent floor or the surveillance cameras in the unit, resulting in the rape of a 13-year-old patient. It awarded the victim $535 million in damages. A $387 million lawsuit now in progress involves dozens of former patients of a UHS hospital in Virginia, who allege sexual or physical abuse, negligence, falsification of records and deliberate misdiagnoses to prolong their stays.
In 2020, UHS settled with the United States Department of Justice for $122 million for 18 separate actions alleging, among other things, improper use of restraint, failure to discharge patients when hospitalization was no longer necessary, and failure to provide adequate supervision of staff.
Egregious as these widespread-to-the-point-of-routine abuses of human rights sound, they all amount to the tip of psychiatry’s iceberg of criminality-for-profit masquerading as “mental health.” This October, another Washington area psychiatric hospital, Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, was outed by The Washington Post as a war zone, rife with out-of-control violence, rape, death and unreported cases of abuse and neglect, pushing Maryland health department officials to perform a “top-to-bottom review and investigation.”
Disability Rights DC’s report is a 36-page indictment of PIW. It chronicles case after case of sexual and physical assault, injury and death, all in a framework of stonewalling silence, leading to zero accountability; PIW has failed to send the required reports on major unusual incidents within its walls to the Department of Behavioral Health—for years.
In a monumental understatement, Disability Rights DC’s report concludes: “These conditions are unacceptable.”
Among the patients interviewed by PIW, one explains: “This situation taught me that I should not have reached out for help.”
“[It] felt more like a prison than a place of healing,” said another.
“I was not suicidal when I entered this unit, but I was when I left,” another said.
DC Councilmember Christina Henderson, disgusted with the enormity of the abuse at PIW, said, “It’s like, ‘Well, you have to take what we’re giving you because we’re the only ones that are here.’ I don’t like to be threatened,” Henderson said.
No one likes to be threatened, Ms. Henderson.
And a $375 billion global industry that rapes, maims and kills under the pretense of help threatens us all.
