A BuzzFeed News investigation has caught a macabre glimpse into the institutional abuse of the Hill Crest Behavioral Health Center in Birmingham Alabama, that is part of Universal Health Services, the country’s largest psychiatric hospital chain. In internal videos exposed by the news outlet, you can see staff members beating and abusing their young patients, we have to warn you that the images are explicit and hard to watch.
Hayden Vice, the 15-year-old patient that is shown in the April 2015 video receiving a brutal beating by mental health technician Isaac Doughty, is only one of the many patients that have come forward to talk about the abuse they suffered at Hill Crest. Vice was beaten for refusing to take a shower mostly because the doctor had told him not to get the cast on his leg wet. Vice claims that the bigger abuses happened off camera.
In a video interview, Vice claims that the tech nurse started smashing his head into a dresser and then proceeded to slam his broken leg to the ground repeatedly. “I’m surprised it didn’t paralyze my leg, the way that he was slamming it,” Vice said. Doughty who was contacted to comment on the video says “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Kinda feel like I was nobody, it just made me feel like I didn’t wanna live no more,” said Vice about his feelings after the incident that left him with several bruises, scratches and a gash above his eye, not accounting for the mental trauma that it also caused. Doughty continued working in the hospital for several months after the crime, before he resigned in order to focus on nursing school.
UHS, revenues from last year exceeded $8 billion only from its behavioral health facilities, a third of that revenue, comes directly from taxpayer dollars. The company owns more than 200 for-profit psychiatric facilities and serve 455,000 patients. They are now under state and federal scrutiny because of the myriad of allegations against them.
The allegations include such troubling accusations like “holding patients until their insurance runs out, regardless of actual medical need; inadequate staffing and training that endangers both employees and patients; and physical abuse of patients.” The state of Oklahoma catching the drift of this problem decided to terminate its Medicaid contract with the company and stopped sending kids under state custody to their facilities.
“They don’t treat those kids right. They treat them like they’re animals in a zoo,” said a former nurse of Hill Crest. “I wouldn’t send my dog there.” the facility made a statement about the videos and said that they are “isolated incidents” and that they’re ““not indicative of the quality of care provided at Hill Crest.”
“We regret and are disappointed in the instances of inappropriate conduct by our employees, which was inconsistent with the facility’s policies and their training,” read the statement, however, UHS declined to comment further on the allegations.
BuzzFeed is urging people with information to contact them at [email protected]. To learn how to reach the news outlet securely, go to tips.buzzfeed.com.
Article inspired by BuzzFeed News // A Prescription For Violence