It’s Official: Kings County Hospital Is a “Hellhole.”
Sometimes I wonder if all the good done by deinstitutionalization isn’t vanishing in a cloud of mistreatment once again. Remember the woman who died on the floor of the ER at a Brooklyn psych hospital? Now a New York Daily News article reveals that’s just one incident of many that make that hospital a “snake pit.”
Despite several probes after the negligent death of a woman in its emergency room, Kings County Hospital’s psychiatric ward remains a hellhole for its vulnerable patients. The psych ward - known as G Building - has been the scene of a half-dozen violent attacks since August, including the rape of a female patient by another patient in a day room, the Daily News has learned.
The most recent incident occurred Thanksgiving weekend when a patient tried to strangle another patient, a source said.
“There’s been a real spike in violence over a sustained period,” the source said.
A lawyer for the city revealed the attacks in a letter to Brooklyn Federal Magistrate Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, who is presiding over a suit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the state Mental Hygiene Legal Service against the hospital.
Lawyer Emily Sweet wanted to fax the letter to the judge under seal, but Matsumoto ordered the shocking disclosures be made public.
“We regret to inform the court that there have been several reported recent instances of alleged patient-on-patient violence as well as inappropriate sexual contact among patients,” Sweet’s letter begins.
The letter refers only to the Thanksgiving incident as being confirmed, but the source said a suspect in the rape has been arrested.
In a tragic twist, the rape victim was being treated at the hospital for depression related to having been raped earlier.
Can you imagine anything worse? As a rape survivor, I simply cannot imagine being the victim of such a violation in the wake of the first violation and coming through that mentally intact. That woman’s life could be ruined. There were times, even many years after I was raped, when I was in situations where I felt vulnerable to violation. Just having that feeling was enough to trigger flashbacks and depression, if not outright breaks from reality.
Daily News writer John Marzulli writes, “The feds are expected to release soon a ‘findings letter,’ a precursor to government legal action. The letter will outline violations at the hospital.” That’s going to be one hell of a letter.
Brooklyn psych ward a snake pit
Thanks to Joe for the tip.
Liz | 10:48 AM | Uncategorized
How can they allow this place to stay open while they investigate? If it were a medical unit they would close it, but since it’s “psych. patients” they keep it open. The rape is just one of so many instances that call out for the option of single gender psychiatric units and ER’s, including same gender staff but we seem to be going backwards on this in the U.S. instead of forwards. In the ’80’s there were many women’s psychiatric units, now hardly any are left.
Where commissions, reports, initiatives, pledges, promises, statutes, task forces, and media attention have failed to insure humane care at our nation’s psychiatric facilities, I had believed that the threat of litigation or the actual filing of a complaint would lead to change. It now appears that institutions fear little knowing that they merely need represent change - “We are …”, “We will ….”, “We have …”
After the death of Esmin Green a spokesperson for the NYC Health & Hospital Corporation was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “We are committed to a transformation there that will address all aspects of the operation — including environmental, staffing, the culture, training, processes, security, etc. — to help prevent something like this from happening again.” Here there was going to be more then change; there was going to be transformation.
At Kings County transformation was more about words then deeds and given this persons continue to suffer needlessly and in some cases horribly.
NYCLU Compliant, filed May 2, 2007: http://www.nyclu.org/pdfs/KCHC_complaint.pdf
I am a rape survivor too. During more than one hospitalization I’ve felt very vulnerable. One time I woke up in my hospital bed in the middle of the night with a co-patient standing next to my bed looming over me. I screamed and ran to the nursing station; they just told him to go back to his room and told me to go back to sleep (but I was terrified, and couldn’t sleep the rest of the night). It set back my recovery. I’ve also been sexually harrassed and groped by men who were hypersexual from mania.
Not to blame it all on men: a female co-patient who was manic and disinhibited enjoyed kickboxing the rest of us. Staff would tell her to stay in her room but it wasn’t seclusion and she’d simply walk back out when the nurse left, only to kick someone else in the face. There were at least half a dozen victims while she was there (luckily not me, but I witnessed her doing it).
I don’t mean to give the impression that a lot of people with mental illness are violent because of course they aren’t, but a small number are, and the rest of the patients are seldom protected from them.
The problem is that when everyone with every sort of mental illness is lumped into one overcrowded, understaffed ward with no real security these kind of incidents will happen. Brooklyn isn’t unique at all. Definitely someone with PTSD or depression after sexual abuse shouldn’t be in the same ward as sexual offenders, but they are anyway. There’s nowhere else to go.
Worse is when someone is assaulted and rightly calls the police but the police won’t respond, because they or the courts won’t take seriously some crazy person in the psych ward. I’m glad to hear that man was arrested.
The hospital minimizing a rape as “inappropriate sexual contact” is pretty awful, too. I’ve seen and heard about actual inappropriate (or at least against the rules) conduct i.e. consenting co-patients having oral sex in a room. To equate that with sexual assault is offensive.
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