Acadia Healthcare — which until recently operated a location in Utah — lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when detaining them was not medically necessary, a New York Times investigation found.
Acadia Healthcare ’s Utah facility, Highland Ridge , was closed earlier this year after state regulators investigated reports of dozens of rapes and assaults. Acadia Healthcare is one of America’s largest chains of psychiatric hospital s. Since the pandemic exacerbated a national mental health crisis, the company’s revenue has soared. Its stock price has more than doubled.
A social worker spent six days inside an Acadia hospital in Florida after she tried to get her bipolar medications adjusted. A woman who works at a children’s hospital was held for seven days after she showed up at an Acadia facility in Indiana looking for therapy. And after police officers raided an Acadia hospital in Georgia, 16 patients told investigators that they had been kept there “with no excuses or valid reason,” according to a police report.
Acadia’s Lakeview Behavioral Health Hospital in Norcross, Ga., on Aug. 20, 2024. Acadia Healthcare is holding people against their will to maximize insurance payouts, a Times investigation found. Every day spent in a psychiatric hospital can be a trial. At Acadia facilities around the country, health inspectors have found that some patients did not receive therapy, were unsupervised or were denied access to vital medications. Many inspection reports described rapes, assaults and filthy conditions.
The success has attracted notice on Wall Street. With its stock price rising, Acadia is valued at about $7 billion. Its CEO, Christopher H. Hunter, was paid more than $7 million last year. The timing was ideal. Over the next several years, Acadia got a lift from Obamacare, which required insurers to cover mental health. Today Acadia has 54 inpatient psychiatric hospitals with a total of 5,900 beds.
In a few states, Acadia has dispatched teams to overwhelmed ERs to help them determine whether patients need to be hospitalized. These employees, known as assessors, are supposed to be objective. But several said Acadia scolded them when they suggested that patients be sent to other psychiatric hospitals.
LeDesha Haynes, a former human resources director for Acadia, in Dacula, Ga., on Aug. 20, 2024. Haynes said the judgment of employees who assessed potential patients “was clouded” by pressure from above. Another was a retired city employee, who asked the Times to identify her by her initials, T.B. In March 2021, she was feeling depressed and went to her doctor’s office to get a therapist recommendation. A nurse there provided her several options, including visiting Park Royal in Fort Myers, Florida, an Acadia hospital near her home. She said an employee at Park Royal had told her that in order to get therapy, she would have to sign herself in.
In 2022, for example, state inspectors criticized an Acadia hospital in Reading, Pennsylvania, for having instructed workers to avoid adjectives like “calm” and “compliant” in a patient’s chart. That same year, employees at Acadia hospitals in Ohio and Michigan complained to their state regulators that doctors had written false statements in patients’ medical charts to justify continuing their stays.
Jessie Roeder, a former executive at two Acadia hospitals, in Tampa, Fla., on June 28, 2024.Under state laws, patients generally must pose an imminent threat to themselves or others in order to be held against their will in a psychiatric facility. Even then, hospitals can hold people for just a handful of days, unless the patients agree to stay longer or a judge or a medical professional determines that they are not ready to leave.
Simply filing a petition allowed the hospital to legally hold the patients — and bill their insurance — until the court date, which can be several days after the petition is filed. Blair said this was often necessary to provide enough care to stabilize patients.Kathryn MacKenzie, a school social worker, had recently moved to Tampa and didn’t yet have a local psychiatrist. In August 2020, she visited an emergency room to have her prescriptions for bipolar disorder evaluated.
Robertson said her daughter has become terrified of seeking help because she fears she could find herself trapped back inside.
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