Mentally ill patients in Illinois' psychiatric hospitals face filthy, unsafe conditions, sometimes lying in their own excrement or tied down for hours at a time, a court-ordered study of the system said.
In a scathing indictment of the Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, experts commissioned as part of a lawsuit said patients receive scant treatment while in the department's care and are subjected to profound disrespect.The report compared some parts of the system to "the back wards of state psychiatric hospitals of 30 years ago."
"Our state hospitals - violent, poorly run institutions - are the most graphic examples of a mental health system which simply does not do the job," said Ben Wolf of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. The ACLU filed suit on behalf of patients against the department and Gov. Jim Edgar.
The report, originally sealed by U.S. District Judge Brian Duff, was released only after The Associated Press began legal proceedings seeking disclosure of the document.
The judge commissioned the report, paid for by the ACLU and the department, in 1993. The ACLU used a nearly identical suit in 1988 to win court-supervised reforms at the Department of Children and Family Services.
Edgar spokesman Mike Lawrence said the governor has been improving the state's mental hospitals.
"The Illinois system was not created overnight, and there is no mental health system in the country that was reformed overnight," Lawrence said.
The experts tracked 48 people through the mental health system.
Among their findings:
- A female patient at the Elgin Mental Health Center was tied down in full-body restraints for 24 hours at a time. Her therapist ordered that she not be released from the restraints until she went for at least 90 minutes without "smiling, not averting her eyes, not laughing."
- In three of five private residential centers where the state places some patients, some were found lying in their own excrement and urine.
- In one residential center, patients wore only skimpy gowns that reached no lower than their waists.
- Therapists had meaningful post-discharge plans for only a handful of the patients studied, contributing to an "unmerry-go-round" of repeated psychiatric hospitalizations.