Lawsuit: Psych Hospital Faked Records to Boost Profits

A Washington, DC, woman who says she had a nightmarish experience at a psychiatric hospital after her husband claimed she was suicidal is suing the for-profit institution and its corporate owner, United Health Services. In the proposed class-action suit, the woman says doctors at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington falsified her mental health records and refused to let her make phone calls while she was held against her will for four days last year, the Washington Post reports.

• The woman says her ordeal began after she argued with her husband in April amid divorce proceedings and went for a walk to clear her head. She says she was surrounded by police, handcuffed, and placed in a back of a cruiser after her husband falsely claimed she had been diagnosed with a mental illness and was considering suicide.

• The woman says she was taken to a behavioral health crisis center and spoke with a doctor for a few minutes. She says she was "stunned and terrified" when another doctor, whom she never met, sent her to PIW for a seven-day involuntary commitment.
• The woman says she was detained in grim, unsanitary conditions based on a "safety risk assessment" that "was false, inaccurate, and entirely belied by all other findings upon admission." She says she was "entirely ignored" by staff during her first two days at the facility. She says she secured a judge's order for her release after using a worker's phone to call a public defender—but the institution falsified records to make it appear it had decided she wasn't at risk of suicide before the order was issued.

• The lawsuit accuses PIW, the city's only private psychiatric hospital, of involuntarily hospitalizing patients and unnecessarily prolonging hospitalizations because of a "singular focus on profit. "Behind this is a massive corporate enterprise that is continuing to expand rapidly and has made no bones about the fact that they are interested in nothing more than expansion and increasing occupancy in these facilities," attorney Drew LaFramboise tells the Post.
• The lawsuit follows years of increased scrutiny of the hospital and United Health Services. Disability Rights DC has released multiple reports detailing abuse and neglect at the facility, WAMU reported last year.

(More psychiatric hospital stories.)