Mistreatment of mentally ill patients in the early 90's?

I'm writing a book and I need a general idea of treatments that were abusive to mentally ill patients in the 1990's specifically 1992. I know that in the before they were put through ECT and sexually abused but I'm thinking more along the lines of getting injected with experimental drugs and such. Help would be appreciated.|||I suggest an examination of the billing system, with an emphasis on insurance fraud. Rather than the shocking horror-movie type abuses or drug experiments, these are actual cases from New Jersey in the past 30 years, including 1992: I'm using present tense because much of what occurred in the 90's is still true today. The only difference in NJ is that State Hospitals are being gradually phased out into group homes. Marlboro and the the particularly infamous Greystone have closed.



Medication abuse was most frequently perpetrated by doctors who over-prescribed patients or prescribed them ineffective medications in order to receive benefits from the drug company that produced it. This was actually much more common with doctors treating so-called out-patients.



Generally in hospitals the medications weren't administered as experiments at all- they were merely used to keep patients from being a problem- nobody is easier to handle than a patient who is so zonked out on medication they sleep all the time. If not asleep, they are like zombies.



Insurance fraud was (and is) a major component of the abuse in psychiatric hospitals. The fraud itself might not be an abuse of the person, but indirectly it means patients are not being cared for- they are merely housed so the insurance can be collected. This is true generally of private hospitals, who prey on teens and their gullible parents. The patient is in a system that is ripe for abuse.



Lack of accountability. in 1997/8 I personally witnessed the strangling of a mentally retarded man of 19, who had limited motor skills which inhibited his speech. He stuttered and had trouble forming complete sentences. He was not strangled to death, but he was in severe pain and his eyes watered. The man who did this was an HST, a "Human Services Technician," supposedly screened and trained by the State of New Jersey.



I reported what I had seen to his "treatment team," consisting of a room full of Doctors, therapists and others. Their response was "oh, that didn't happen. He would have told us." They will often dismiss legitimate complaints because the person is simply psychiatric and anything they say cannot be trusted. In this case, he couldn't talk at all, except in broken sentences that needed time and patience to be understood.



A lot of the sexual abuse was perpretrated by patients on other patients, due to an inattentive/apathetic HST group. Gov. Whitman even complained of the number of pregnancies in State Hospitals in the 1990's.



State Hospitals fall into the insurance trap for the opposite reason as private facilities- local hospitals and mental health clinics receive patients who do not have insurance or it runs out- rather than release them and have a liability on their hands, they ship them off to State Hospitals- whether they are severely ill or not. Some are merely people who had a bad night or drinking (maybe drugs) and ended up in the hospital for a psych evaluation.



Another abuse [in New Jersey at least] was and still is double-billing the state. A private hospital or group home would bill the state for services that were simply not rendered. This was discovered when bills were being submitted for the same patient for two different services at the same time, when it was imposible for them to have been at both. A simple cover up is to claim a clerical error. The funding intended for patients is being dried up by fraud.



If you've worked in the system much of this may be familiar. I could write a book too, literally, but I don't know how interesting it would be- I never saw Tuskegee type experiments or psycho-surgeries, just things described above.



PS: I have relatives (deceased) who worked in the famous Bellevue psych ward for decades. That was in the days of lobotomies and Thorazine zombies. Unfortunately I didn't hear many stories from them. Of course, this was pre-1992, they were there from the 50's to the 70's.|||Here's a real life example.





In 1992, my son, who suffered from schizophrenia, was hospitalized in a mental hospital in the city of Baltimore Md. One week when I went to see him I saw he had a black eye.





"What happened?" I gasped.





"The attendants want us to fight each other, for their amusement. I refused to fight. One of them hit me."





I tore off to find the doctor. I told him what had happened. His remark will remain forever etched in my memory. "WHO TOLD YOU?" was all he wanted to know.





My son and I made a plan. He would come to visit me the next weekend, and I would help him escape. Which I did.