Disturbing surveillance videos have been released that show young patients being abused by nurses at the biggest psychiatric ward in the United States.
The videos, which were taken at Hill Crest Behavioral Health in Birmingham, Alabama, were first obtained by Buzzfeed News.
Hill Crest is owned by America’s largest psychiatric hospital chain United Health Services (UHS), which made more than $8billion in revenues last year. One third of that amount comes from taxpayer dollars.
The chain is made up of more than 200 for-profit mental health hospitals that serve roughly 455,000 patients total.
The videos, which were taken at Hill Crest Behavioral Health in Birmingham, Alabama, were first obtained by Buzzfeed News
Footage of one particularly brutal incident shows the moment 15-year-old Hayden Vice got into an argument with one of the employees at the hospital Isaac Doughty because he refused to take a shower because he didn’t want to get his cast wet
Footage of one particularly brutal incident shows the moment 15-year-old Hayden Vice was taken into a room and allegedly attacked by two male nurses.
The video is from April 2015 and shows Vice hobbling along along a hallway, one of his legs having broken, when a health technician walking towards him tells him to take a shower.
The teenager then paused on his crutches to tell him that a nurse instructed him not to get his cast wet.
But the worker, who was identified as Isaac Doughty, told Vice again that it wasn’t an option and he was going to take a shower.
‘No, the hell I’m not – I’m going to do what the nurse told me to do,’ Vice believes he responded, he told Buzzfeed.
The video then shows Doughty walk towards Vice with his finger in the air before bringing both of his hands around Vice’s neck and slamming him into the wall.
Vice’s crutches fell, and shortly after he did as well, with Doughty pushing him onto the floor.
Doughty then grabs him around the middle and with another worker hauls him into the closest open room – out of view of the camera.
After an unknown amount of time Vice hobbles out of the room covered in blood and bends over to pick up his crutches. He then turns to attempt to strike Doughty with them, but isn’t quick enough.
Video shows that Doughty then yanks him back into the room, once again out of sight of the camera.
The video then shows Doughty walk towards Vice with his finger in the air before bringing both of his hands around Vice’s neck and slamming him into the wall
Doughty then grabs him around the middle and with another worker hauls him into the closest open room – out of view of the camera
After an unknown amount of time Vice hobbles out of the room covered in blood and bends over to pick up his crutches. He then turns to attempt to strike Doughty with them, but isn’t quick enough
Vice didn’t emerge from that room again for at least 30 minutes, and off camera, he told Buzzfeed that Doughty was slamming his head into a dresser.
He also claims that in the room Doughty picked up his right foot by its cast and then smashed it into the ground repeatedly. The impact was so hard vice said he is surprised he didn’t paralyze his leg.
However Doughty told Buzzfeed he didn’t do anything wrong in the encounter.
Video shows that Doughty then yanks him back into the room, once again out of sight of the camera. When he comes out of the room he is covered in blood
A few hours after the encounter, though, Vice had to go to the emergency room for stitches above his eye. His mother, Trecia Gilmore, said she wasn’t told that her son was in the hospital until the next day, and said the hospital told her he got hurt when he fell in the hallway.
Having seen her son covered in bruises during his nine-month stay at the facility before, Gilmore said she didn’t believe that account and made the trip to Hill Crest to visit her son.
She says when she got there he was covered in fresh bruises and had a row of stitches above his eye. The sight was so much that it made her cry, and she demanded he be released immediately.
Staff protested, she recalled, but did release Vice to her that night.
His hospital records say Vice was a ‘violent’ teenager with ‘severe and dangerous agitation,’ but his therapist said that he was repeatedly assaulted at the facility and said staff members would purposely antagonize him.
Vice said while he was there he felt like he was under attack, and like they didn’t care.
‘It just made me feel like I didn’t’ want to live no more,’ he told Buzzfeed.
Once he was released his mother took him to the hospital where a doctor diagnosed him with contusion – caused by the incident in the video.
In another incident, Hill Crest surveillance footage the moment Adryana Metcalf, 16, was dragged and carried face down by three large male employees at t the hospital.
In the video, Metcalf gets in an argument with staff members because she had moved her chair closer to the television, instead of sitting where they told her to.
After a few moments of argument, she gets up, frustrated, and walks to sit into the corner.
In another incident, Hill Crest surveillance footage the moment Adryana Metcalf, 16, was dragged and carried face down by three large male employees at t the hospital. In the video, Metcalf gets in an argument with staff members because she had moved her chair closer to the television, instead of sitting where they told her to
After a few moments of argument, she gets up, frustrated, and walks to sit into the corner, before being surrounded by three male employees who grab her by the arms and drag her across the floor
A few minutes later three men surround her in the corner of the room and told her to go to her room.
The three men then reach down grab her by the arms, attempting to pick her up and out of her chair, but ending up dragging her across the floor.
As they are pulling on her wrists, the teenage girl appears to pull her knees to her chest to keep herself from sliding across the floor and then tries to shield her face with her arms.
After a few minutes of struggling, they are able to overpower Metcalf and flip her onto her stomach and pin her face into the ground.
While she tries to wiggle herself free, a nurse comes over and gives her a shot. The three men then pick her up by her arms and legs and carry her out of the room.
‘They picked me up like some sort of animal,’ she told Buzzfeed News.
She said that when they got into her room, out of sight of the cameras, things got worse. There she claims they leaned her over her bed frame and forced her head into the mattress so she couldn’t breathe.
While she tries to wiggle herself free, a nurse comes over and gives her a shot
After a few minutes of struggling, they are able to overpower Metcalf and flip her onto her stomach and pin her face into the ground.
The three men then pick her up by her arms and legs and carry her out of the room
Metcalf’s mother, Heather Todd, said she was told about the incident from her daughter just after it took place. She said that the hospital told her her daughter was exaggerating, but didn’t believe it.
Unfortunately. because she didn’t’ have custody, she wasn’t able to take her daughter from the hospital.
She is still fighting to regain custody from the state, and said she doesn’t understand why Adryana was put there in the first place. #’All they did was f*** up her life.’
These videos are just two in a series obtained by Buzzfeed which allegedly show patients, including young children, being tackled, dragged and choked by staff members at UHS hospitals.
Patients were sometimes even dragged into open empty bedrooms and beaten viciously, the outlet says.
In a written statement UHS said these videos are ‘isolated incidents’ that don’t show 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,’ UHS said in a statement.
The company is under increasing scrutiny by state and federal agencies, according to Buzzfeed, which is conducting an ongoing two-year investigation into its practices.
UHS has been accused of holding patients who no longer need to be there until their insurance runs out, not training staff members effectively, endangering employees and patients and physically abusing patients.
Oklahoma no longer sends children in custody of the state to UHS facilities and terminated its Medicaid contract, and senators have come out against company practices.