Intake – American's largest psychiatric chain

&gt; Lauren Singer, who worked for six months at the front desk of Colorado’s Highlands Behavioral, said people who were waiting in the lobby for an assessment would ask her what it would entail. “I would frequently get yelled at for overstepping my bounds and telling them too much about the evaluation process,” Singer said. A button behind the receptionist’s desk controlled the lock to the front door of the facility, and, she said, “If someone came in voluntarily, I wasn’t allowed to let them out of the door.”<p>That&#x27;s terrifying. Earlier in the article they talked about people coming in for simple depression screening based the hospital&#x27;s ads, but things like locking the doors behind people who choose to come in are probably keeping a lot of people from getting the help they need.<p>Medical care, especially medical care with an involuntary component, should never be for profit. The profit motive is just too corrupting.

Based on my experience as a patient (not at a UHS facility, as far as I can tell) I&#x27;m pretty confident that the stuff reported in this article is just the tip of the iceberg. These facilities are structured in a way that makes people doubt their own memories and feel powerless, even before the neuroleptics come out. Treatment &quot;progress&quot; is predicated on -- if not synonymous with -- submission. I was put on suicide watch after having a bad night&#x27;s sleep and complaining that my experience had been harmful rather than helpful. I found out later that the psychiatrist had written in my file that I&#x27;d had psychotic episodes, which never happened (I&#x27;m torn on whether to attribute this to error or falsification). I&#x27;ve thought about challenging this, but I wouldn&#x27;t even know where to begin, and I&#x27;m fairly certain it would just end up being my word against his and not actually doing any good. Basically, the playing field is heavily tilted against reporting misconduct. For every person Buzzfeed was able to find, there are probably ten who didn&#x27;t feel like they could speak out about it, or convinced themselves that they were just being irrational since, after all, they were literally a mental patient.

American asylums are a perfect example of the sin and corruption at the root of American society: dehumanizing and illegal detainment of human beings to preserve power and profits.<p>...<p>In the 1970s, a researcher sent fake (healthy) patients to asylums. They were loaded with powerful antipsychotics and not allowed to leave until they faked the cures the psychologists expected to see.<p>When the fake patients were all out the story blew the lid on the American psychological profession, so the psychologists said &quot;bring more fakes, we can sort them out.&quot;<p>The original researcher said &quot;sure.&quot;<p>The psychologists proudly stated a few weeks later that they had weeded out several dozens of &quot;fakes.&quot;<p>There was no second fake cohort.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rosenhan_experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Rosenhan_experiment</a>

By the way let&#x27;s not forget this is excellent investigative reportage by Buzzfeed who is using their clickbait revenues to do real journalism.

&gt; “Your job is to get patients,” said a former clinician at Salt Lake Behavioral. “And you get them however you get them.”<p>&gt; Two dozen current and former employees from 14 UHS facilities across the country told BuzzFeed News that the rule was to keep patients until their insurance ran out in order to get the maximum payment.<p>Coincidentally, I was discharged this morning from a psychiatric hospital in Canada. In a non-profit system, there is no financial motive to keep patients longer than necessary. Furthermore, hospitals in Canada almost always operate at capacity to keep costs low. This is a double-edged sword of course, but it means doctors have an incentive to help their patients recover so they can be discharged to make room for new arrivals.

So, I don&#x27;t know that this is universally &quot;a thing&quot; but when I had a 3-5 hour break down in June I got in contact with the University of New Mexico&#x27;s SHAC[1], I was registered but not yet taking a class and I think its open to the general public. They give you a little 10-15 minute &quot;counseling triage&quot; and then give you an appointment or whatever as they feel appropriate.<p>If you feel like you&#x27;re in a bad place I encourage you to call your local university. <i>Even if you aren&#x27;t a student</i>: schools are extremely used to dealing with people who don&#x27;t know how to get started with the mental health (or any health) industry and they won&#x27;t fucking kidnap you.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shac.unm.edu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;shac.unm.edu&#x2F;</a> they accept any one by the way. Please look for help if you feel like everything is awful, even if it&#x27;s just finding some one to talk to.

It is so crazy how doctors can just lock people up and drug them. No trial, no right to an attorney, not even a one phone call always... Someone who just murdered someone and went to jail has more rights than these doctors give people.<p>Personally, I think a majority of the mental health industry is a fraud. These are the same people who voted that being LGBTQ is a mental illness in the DSM. :( Plus they don&#x27;t even have blood testing like the majority of doctors can use as a test.<p>Then they over diagnosed kids and drug them, as a result of the one size fits all and boring education system - which promotes testing and memorization over charter and critical thinking.

Yeah, after reading all this, I wouldn&#x27;t blame those patients if they didn&#x27;t trust healthcare professionals anymore. It&#x27;s clear these people don&#x27;t have the patient&#x27;s best interests in mind.<p>Locking the doors behind people coming into the hospital voluntarily? I wish they were making this up.

I immediately went to their web site, and looked for their facilities near me. There are two, and a third in the region.<p>I hope I remember not to go there in a crisis.

This would make two incredible movies.<p>First a horror movie about false involuntary admittance.<p>Second, a fantastic corporate drama ala michael clayton about the corporate hierarchy that built, runs and protects the machine.<p>If anyone writes the screenplay for these, I want royalties.

Psychiatry in America is an ongoing &quot;crime against humanity&quot;. The third world gets better results for their mental health patients because they can&#x27;t afford the pharmaceutical industry&#x27;s FDA-certified psychotropic medications.<p>In October 2016 I found videos of my friend before the first hospital. She quipped about alcohol and drugs, but sounded &quot;normal&quot;. We were frying donuts.<p>About two weeks after the videos were filmed, my friend ran out of alcohol. Her mother called the &quot;crisis team&quot;, who took her to the hospital. I don&#x27;t know what happened, exactly, but I assume they treated her with Haldol, an old cheap &quot;tranquilizer&quot; that is sold to patients as an &quot;anti-psychotic&quot;.<p>But... It&#x27;s been known since the late 1970&#x27;s that anti-psychotics make psychosis worse over time. Robert Whitaker wrote &quot;the case against anti-psychotics&quot; [1] to provide as succinct a case against this class of drugs&#x27; use as possible.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madinamerica.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-case-against-antipsychotics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.madinamerica.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-case-against-antips...</a><p>After being given this psychosis-provoking drug, my friend was diagnosed as &quot;persistently disabled.&quot; This diagnosis (professional opinion) is disproved by my videos, but these have never been viewed by any judge.<p>Anti-psychotics are also known to make cocaine users more likely to use cocaine, which is known to cause psychosis. Alcohol withdrawal is also a known cause of psychosis [2]. My friend told the psychiatrists that she&#x27;d been drinking 2 bottles of liquor a day (methadone side effect, I think), and using cocaine, but they gave her anti-psychotics anyways.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Substance-induced_psychosis#ICD-10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Substance-induced_psychosis#IC...</a><p>My friend escaped briefly from her court-ordered medications in March 2016.... Then she was given an SSRI &quot;anti-depressant&quot; in May 2016, which caused much anxiety, which led to her getting arrested... She&#x27;s now being forced to take tranquilizers again.<p>I&#x27;m still trying to protect my friend from her doctors. When a petition to the court is dismissed &quot;without prejudice&quot; it means that you can correct the errors and re-file. I&#x27;ve re-filed twice, but I don&#x27;t think the judge even read the second and third petitions. I guess I&#x27;m going to the court of appeals next... &lt;sigh&gt;<p>edit 1: clarification... edit 2: added the paragraph about getting ordered by the court to submit to psychiatry. edit 3: added sentence about the third world<p>edit 4: Oh my... This buzzfeed article is about &quot;Universal Health Services&quot;. My friend stayed at two of their locations: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uhsinc.com&#x2F;locations&#x2F;uhs-facilities-map-usa&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.uhsinc.com&#x2F;locations&#x2F;uhs-facilities-map-usa&#x2F;</a><p>edit 5: I actually went to talk to an investigator with the state attorney general&#x27;s office this morning - his department was &quot;health fraud and abuse&quot;. He was not optimistic of being able to find something to investigate. I&#x27;m going to print this buzzfeed article and take it over.<p>edit 6: forgot to include link for [1]

They only need to merge with a private prison operator and you have the perfect customer pipeline.

Great to see the Investigative, Serious Business arm of Buzzfeed get linked here (I don&#x27;t visit their site often but know of their growing legit digging). A sensitive, yet salacious type of subject that can use a spotlight in my opinion. Simply put, I hope for improvement.<p>One of the first films I ever watched with my Dad was &quot;One Flew Over The Cuckoo&#x27;s Nest&quot; partly because it&#x27;s part of his life history (grew up in Pac Northwest, ran into Ken Kesey a few times) but also because of the amazing life lessons within. The book is even more epic and deep. And, growing up in the US, I know mental health is still not quite up in the priorities as much as, well, look at commercials, there&#x27;s a glut of dick-pills for sale.<p>I&#x27;m a proponent of using fiction to help re-package heavy, important lessons that journalism brings up. I&#x27;d written a short treatment years ago about a serious PhD Psychiatry student discovering most everybody in the &quot;profession&quot; at his Public&#x2F;Private Treatment Center suffered from their own DSM-diagnosable serious mental illness. From macabre understanding we&#x27;re all flawed might come enlightenment. Or, you know, just comedy.

They are like the ITT of the psychiatric care industry.

There was an interesting Diane Rehm show about involuntary psychiatric admission recently. It seemed a bit better balanced than the Buzzfeed piece since it wasn&#x27;t focused on the apparent misdeeds of a particular organization.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedianerehmshow.org&#x2F;shows&#x2F;2016-11-29&#x2F;the-debate-over-involuntary-psychiatric-treatment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thedianerehmshow.org&#x2F;shows&#x2F;2016-11-29&#x2F;the-debate-ove...</a>

There should be a special place in hell for people who abuse the most vulnerable of people.

Are there any UHS locations in New York State or California?

<i>&quot;Current and former employees from at least 10 UHS hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method — which sometimes meant exaggerating people’s symptoms or twisting their words to make them seem suicidal — and to hold them until their insurance payments ran out.&quot;</i><p>Don&#x27;t worry, free-market ideologues will coolly tell you. Their logic will seem airtight: over time, if Intake&#x27;s psychiatric wards were really, truly locking up sane people who don&#x27;t want to be locked up, the reputation of these facilities would no doubt have already suffered by now, and the company would have already been forced to close them. These incidents can only be isolated cases, regardless of the evidence. The profit motive will keep the company in check.<p>If you believe that, you haven&#x27;t read the article.

I have a (relatively minor) nit-pick with some of the language in the article.<p>Early in the article the author writes &quot;Current and former employees from at least 10 UHS hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure...&quot;<p>However, a few paragraphs later she writes &quot;But scores of employees from at least a dozen UHS hospitals said those facilities tried to keep beds filled even at the expense...&quot;<p>I don&#x27;t understand why the employees are from &quot;at least&quot; a certain number of hospitals, unless her sources were unclear about where they worked. And why does this number change?

I should hope this comes as no surprise to anyone. Every single psychiatrist I&#x27;ve ever visited had the same policy, only their lock was medicine rather than a door (outpatient vs inpatient). I feel bad for the lady because she didn&#x27;t know any better and joked about suicide, but shouldn&#x27;t it be common sense you don&#x27;t tell anyone about that--you don&#x27;t even joke about it--<i>especially</i> to a doctor with the power to commit you? I&#x27;m pretty sure you can&#x27;t have decent therapy if you&#x27;re not truthful with your therapist, but that&#x27;s the catch-22 of needing mental help in America. Fucked if you don&#x27;t seek it out and really fucked if you do.