"Once people are committed, it goes on their insurance record. These people...are appalled that they now have a psychiatric record for the rest of their lives. It can interfere with any kind of employment opportunity. One of the people I talked to was a professional in the medical field. In her application, she was afraid that they were going to ask her if she ever had psychiatric commitment. How do you get that off the record? That, from a legal point of view, is clearly a damage."4
A disturbing aspect of patient brokers and referral services is that they are largely unregulated. As the St. Petersburg Times reported,5 in Florida and other states, referral personnel do not need licenses or special training before they can deal with the sick and the troubled. So people with criminal records are among the brokers, many of whom will do whatever it takes to get one more body into a treatment center.
Says Paul McDevitt, a licensed Massachusetts mental health counselors: "These people have no ethics at all. They're morally bankrupt. They're like the grave robbers in old England who provided cadavers for the medical schools. The grave robbers of today are taking the bodies of those so confused as to be dead and shipping them out to treatment centers where they never get well. And the doctors who are the pillars of society are still reaping the benefits and still never asking where the bodies come from."
Bogus and Nonexistent Treatments
Psychiatric facilities consistently charge consumers for nontherapeutic treatments or services not performed. Adolescent facilities are common perpetrators of this abuse. One Texas hospital, for example, billed insurance companies $40 a day for relaxation therapy. This treatment, which simply consisted of turning on Muzac while teenagers were getting undressed, was actually far more exorbitant when you consider that each patient's insurance company was billed that price for one person turning on the Muzac one time.
Bruce Wiseman is president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights <http://www.cchr.org>, an organization that champions mental health consumer protection.6 He can provide a plethora of examples of how psychiatrists rip off the system. Wiseman tells of a Texas psychiatrist who was known for his hundred-dollar handshake. All he would do was walk by the beds of various patients, shake hands with them, and then bill each person's insurance company a hundred dollars. Another investigation discovered that charges for nutritional counseling were to cover the person going to lunch. Insurance companies are also charged for individual therapy when a group of people are placed in a room together and told to scream at each other for a couple of hours. These would be a little bit funny if they weren't so devastating in terms of what they do to insurance premiums and our taxes."7
Wiseman states that psychiatrists collect $600,000 to 900,000 a year on bogus or nonexistent treatments. "We have plenty of cases where they just bill the insurance company or the government for treatment that was never given. They don't even see the patient and they send the bills in."7
Abusive Treatments
The scenario worsens when you consider that economic exploitation is often coupled with physical abuse. Wiseman tells how an adolescent facility in Reno tormented a 15 year-old boy and then billed his parents' insurance company $400,000:
"They would drug this kid with Haldol, a so-called antipsychotic drug, until he was in a stupor, and then tie him in four-point restraints. They would tie his hands and feet to the bed, and then tickle him until he was hysterical. For that "treatment" this child's parents' insurance company was billed $400,000, and the insurance company paid it! If anyone else does to a child what the psychiatrist does, it is called child abuse. But here the insurance company pays almost half a million dollars for it. This is the kind of treatment and insurance fraud that exists.
This is not an isolated incident, Wiseman explains, but typical of what goes on: "In the Reno facility, children are subject to frequent take-downs. If a kid 'smarts off' or jumps the guards, he or she is physically abused. One patient in a Texas hospital had her legs strapped to a chair for four hours because she was moving her legs. They called it purposeful exercise, which she was not supposed to do. Kids are made to stand and look at a wall for 16 hours a day for months on end. There is also sexual abuse regularly going on in these hospitals."8
Nickie Saizon, who regrettably placed her son in a psychiatric facility, says that routine punishments were called treatment. Her insurance company was billed exorbitant amounts for these procedures:
"If they punished them with a time out, they had to sit in a chair in the hallway all day without moving. They charged $37.50 for that. When the kids would get mad and angry, they would have a nurse and counselors surround the kids and tell them, 'Get mad, get it out, have your fit.' They would keep on until they got mad and really started having a big fit. Then they put them down on the floor, held them there, and cut their shirt off. For that they charged $45. Then they put them in a room which they call a think tank. The room is bare and empty. There is no carpet, no chairs, nothing. They have to go in there and think over how they should have handled the problem.... They charged $87.50 for this room. Every time you turned around there were hidden costs.9
Wiseman believes that people would be outraged to learn what really goes on in these institutions: "The general public isn't aware of it, but one would be hard pressed to walk into any psychiatric hospital and not weep at the 'treatment' that occurs in these places."8
Cont ...