Advocates Say That St. Elizabeths Has Been Illegally Locking Patients Alone in a Room for Weeks

[TexasTowelie]

Advocates Say That St. Elizabeths Has Been Illegally Locking Patients Alone in a Room for Weeks on End


St. Elizabeths Hospital always had trouble with Tyler Johnson. In order to control their patient, who was there for psychiatric treatment, hospital staff repeatedly put him in one part of his unit and told him he couldn’t leave. There was a line on the floor: Don’t cross it. But sometimes he didn’t listen. That’s when the situation would escalate. According to incident reports obtained by the disability rights program at University Legal Services—an organization that monitors treatment quality at various hospitals in D.C. and advocates for disability rights—one time, Johnson “kept jumping back and forth across the line and was not receptive to staff directive.” So hospital staff made him go to a “seclusion room,” where he was locked up alone until they decided to release him. Another time, Johnson walked out of the area where he’d been told to stay put, and got into an argument with a staff member. They ordered him to walk himself to the seclusion room again, but he ignored that order too. So they put him in a physical hold and dragged him there. (The reports are anonymized; Tyler Johnson is not the patient’s real name.)

But the most extreme incident, ULS says, was when staff took Johnson down to the hospital’s “safety suite.” A barricaded room designed for long-term stays, the safety suite resembles a solitary confinement cell in a prison. The hospital kept Johnson locked alone in there for at least 20 consecutive days.

The District’s only public psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeths has a long history of misusing seclusion (i.e. locking a patient alone in a room), a controversial practice that can cause severe, lasting psychiatric harm for patients. The hospital is operated by the Department of Behavioral Health (DBH), and in 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint against the city for using seclusion too liberally at St. Elizabeths and for violating patients’ constitutional rights. The lawsuit also charged that the hospital did not provide adequate treatment to its patients, and that environmental hazards at the (consequently rebuilt) facility put patients at serious risk. But after nearly a decade of major reform, St. Elizabeths improved its care enough to meet the requirements DOJ set out. The DOJ dropped the lawsuit in 2014.

But since 2014, the percentage of patients that St. Elizabeths puts in seclusion has gone up every year. And even more concerning, says ULS, the hospital recently started ignoring the laws that protect patients from unsafe seclusion, illegally keeping patients locked up alone for weeks on end.

Read more: https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/city-desk/article/21072559/disability-rights-lawyers-say-that-st-elizabeths-has-been-illegally-locking-psychiatric-patients-alone-in-a-room-for-weeks-on-end

[sheshe2]

1. The cruelty of some people is mind-boggling.

[lettucebe]

2. You don't give orders to someone that is mentally unstable

and then expect those orders to be followed. It's ignorant.

That's no different than telling a child, do not cross this invisible line. You are asking them to cross the line. If this is how they treat patients they need to maybe close the place down

[marble falls]

3. People will do the damnest things if they're "ordered" to.