PicoBlog

When I opened my email a few days ago, this headline from Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service appeared in my inbox: “Patient Safety Concerns Raised About New Granite Hills Hospital.”

I was of course horrified, but not surprised. It is a story that is all too familiar to me, as a long-time tracker of psych hospitals and what occurs within their walls. As a witness to, and survivor of, what happens in such places.

A patient is injured due to staff neglect. When she says she needs medical attention, the staff ignore her. Finally, she receives the surgery she needs, but now, she has a new, lifelong injury. All this, in a place that is supposed to be caring for people. Next time, I fear it will be worse.

This person has a family member to advocate for her, who filed the complaint and has been speaking out in the press, but I wonder how many in that place do not have such support? Granite Hills is a psychiatric hospital for poor, unhoused, and uninsured people of Milwaukee—the people no one else will take. The hospital’s administration banks on the fact that they often don’t have anyone to fight for them.

Shiny new building. Same old horrors. In the report, the patient’s relative-advocate speaks of what has always haunted me—how these asylums just keep reinventing themselves:

“At first,” Berry-Roberson said, “Granite Hills seemed like such a really nice place, because it’s really new and modern and all that.”

All of these hospitals were once new and modern, I thought. But it usually takes longer for the abuses to make themselves known. By then, the sparkle has faded.

Granite Hills is owned by the for-profit psych hospital chain Universal Health Services, Inc. The privatization of psychiatric care means these monsters profit from poverty and trauma with Medicaid fraud, allowing people to be hurt, ignoring their pain, keeping them there without medical necessity, extracting every last dollar. Settling, settling, settling in court. And they’re allowed to continue.

I hate that I knew the reports would be coming. I called it here. And here. I guess I didn’t expect it so soon.

When I read the below quote from Milwaukee’s Behavioral Health Division head Michael Lappen, I half hoped he’d seen my op-ed in the Journal-Sentinel.

Lappen said he worries, though, that reports about conditions at Granite Hills create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy “because there are these horror stories about how they’re (Granite Hills) not doing a great job and then it keeps people out of the door.”

“But,” he added, “they have to figure that out.”

How do reports create a self fulfilling prophecy, I wonder?

I sourced my reporting on Granite Hills from Indeed.com, where former workers have been sounding the alarm on the place for months, giving it terrible reviews and yes—telling people not to work there. The worker reviews read as a sort of archive of the bad things that have happened in the less than two full years since opening.

Here’s just one example: “During my short stint (yes stint, felt like I was in prison) there, it was a huge circus.”

Or how about this one: “Also, there is no security if a rapid response occurs everyone is expected to come running and corral the patient, which in my personal opinion isn't safe or effective.” Corral the patient? Nightmare.

If administrators listened to workers EVER, maybe they wouldn’t have this PR problem on their hands now. I don’t have much hope for them figuring it out.

But even before I saw any of those worker reviews, almost two years ago, I wrote this, an excerpt from a reported essay slated to be published in the Mad Studies Reader (eds. Jazmine Russell, Bradley Lewis, and Alisha Ali, Routledge) this year:

I tried to obtain my records from Charter Hospital in 2001. I was sent a letter informing me that they had all been destroyed; I was a year too late. The Charter Behavioral Health empire imploded in 2000 when it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Its downfall was swift. In 1998, the corporation settled with the DOJ after whistleblowers revealed patterns of Medicare fraud, where elders were admitted without medical necessity, and held for as long as possible against their will. Then, in a 1999 60 Minutes expose, Ed Bradley revealed findings from an undercover whistleblower that staff were receiving little to no training. At least one child died from injuries caused by blunt-force restraint techniques.

Psychiatric hospital systems are like a multi-headed hydra: when one topples, another grows in its place. After Charter Behavioral Health went under, twelve of its hospitals were bought for $105 million by Universal Health Services, America’s largest for-profit behavioral health hospital chain. UHS was soon profiting off the same shady billing practices as Charter. By 2017, the corporation was under investigation by three Federal agencies for Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance fraud, holding people against their will for as many days as their insurance would pay. UHS is also notorious for cutting corners to save costs; chronic understaffing has resulted in numerous documented cases of neglect and abuse of patients.

When I read in the Journal-Sentinel in 2015 that Milwaukee County was going to permanently shut down the Mental Health Complex as part of a plan to transition away from its historic overreliance on institutional care, my cells vibrated with giddiness. I thought about how if Mama were alive, we would be celebrating the hospital’s long overdue demise. Na na, na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye, she would sing, and I’d join in for a few rounds. She’d spark up a celebratory joint. We’d cackle with delight and relief.

My happiness waned when I discovered that the replacement for the County Mental Health Complex would be a brand-new hospital run by none other than UHS: a 120-bed, $33 million hospital not in Wauwatosa but in West Allis, on the north side of town. The County’s Behavioral Health Division hoped to grant the contract to a local health system, but UHS was the only bidder. The Fortune 500 corporation had long been wanting to break into the Milwaukee market. As the contract with the County Behavioral Health Division was finalized and signed, UHS was paying the Federal government and states’ attorneys $127 million to settle allegations of Medicare and Medicaid fraud.

Will this brand new hospital, slated to open this summer [note: it did not open until fall of 2021] be yet another snakepit in the making? Will historic patterns of harm now be privatized behind a glass-paned, light-filled, state-of-the-art facade? Will I be reading disturbing reports about this place in the near future? I worry, and wonder, and I think I know the answer.

Reading this almost two years after I wrote it definitely gives me the chills. But this is not some woo-woo prescient psychic vision. It’s simply a prediction based on my study of these places over twenty years, how they rise and fall, are bought and sold, and never really change.

When I posted this article on socials the other day, someone asked me how it could be changed. I replied, Personally I don't think it can be changed, it has to be abolished. They have been trying to make these places ‘better’ for 50 years and the same thing keeps happening.

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