Psychiatric Hospitals

Your article about the dangerous conditions at Spring Grove Hospital was an accurate description of what has been happening in our public psychiatric hospitals ("At mental facility, staffers besieged," March 3). I was a staff psychiatrist at Spring Grove Hospital for 25 years until June 2013, when the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene decided to close the two assisted living units on the hospital grounds. This was an unfortunate decision since those units served as chronic care for many patients who could not get community placements.

Your article about the dangerous conditions at Spring Grove Hospital was an accurate description of what has been happening in our public psychiatric hospitals ("At mental facility, staffers besieged," March 3). I was a staff psychiatrist at Spring Grove Hospital for 25 years until June 2013, when the state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene decided to close the two assisted living units on the hospital grounds. This was an unfortunate decision since those units served as chronic care for many patients who could not get community placements.

According to the Department of Justice, every year about 1.3 million women in the United States are assaulted by an intimate partner, 1 in every 6 women are victims of rape, and there is an incidence of abuse against women in nearly 80 percent of intimate partner homicides. This pattern of violence against women is on exhibition in our psychiatric hospitals where over 80 percent of the residents have experienced sexual or physical abuse. Victims of abuse must receive treatment that focuses on trauma and recovery.

In-patient units at Spring Grove Hospital Center in Catonsville have become troubled environments where serious assaults on hospital staff are common, according to a scathing new report from a consultant for the Maryland health department. The chaos at the state's largest psychiatric hospital, the consultant found, is fueled by a few patients who "prey upon patients and staff with relative impunity" after being ordered by courts to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation — sometimes with dubious symptoms.

Maryland delegates will consider Thursday a bill that would separate men's and women's bedrooms in state psychiatric hospitals, a move that advocates contend would protect vulnerable women but that health officials say they need more time to research. The bill would also require the hospitals to screen patients for risk of abusive behavior and report all instances of sexual abuse and harassment to authorities. The bill is spurred, supporters say, by last year's killing of a female patient on a coed ward at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center, a state psychiatric facility that houses the criminally insane.

One of the three regional state psychiatric hospitals in Central Maryland should be closed by the year 2000, according to a state task force studying the issue.The draft report did not recommend which of the three -- Crownsville Hospital Center in Crownsville, Spring Grove Hospital Center in Catonsville or Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville -- should be closed.Instead, the task force has scheduled public forums next month to gauge community sentiment in the five counties that would be most affected by a hospital closing.

WASHINGTON -- A federal government review of private psychiatric hospital cases -- most of them teen-agers and young children of military families -- has found that in 64 percent of the cases, patients never should have been admitted or were kept longer than necessary or their hospitals could not justify treatment with their medical records.The abuses may have cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.The study by the Defense Department of more than 500 patients admitted to psychiatric hospitals around the nation in 1990 under a federal insurance program for military families also found that many of the programs appeared to provide poor or dangerously deficient care.

A report based on an internal review of the state's psychiatric hospitals concludes that budget cuts and hiring freezes have led to inconsistent treatment of patients, longer hospital stays, and an increased risk of mistakes in the giving of medication.Because of financial problems, "custodial care is becoming more the norm rather than active treatment," says the report prepared by the state Mental Hygiene Administration.The report describes the majority of those who work in the hospitals as "professional, caring and constantly challenging themselves."

The three state psychiatric hospitals in Central Maryland should remain open but continue reducing caseloads by placing more patients in suitable community-based treatment, according to a new report prepared by state mental health officials for the General Assembly.This is a shift from the conclusions of a two-year study that recommended closing one of the three hospital centers -- Crownsville in Anne Arundel, Spring Grove in Catonsville or Springfield in Sykesville -- by 2000.State health officials reviewed the issue at the request of the legislators who are most directly involved with finance and policy decisions relating to state psychiatric hospitals.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- For Vincent Scala, the debate over the civil confinement of sexual predators pits his personal beliefs as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU" against his family ties. In June, Scala's cousin, Concetta Russo-Carriero, was stabbed to death as she walked to her car in the parking garage of a White Plains, N.Y., shopping mall. The homeless man arrested and charged with the crime was released in 2003 after spending nearly 24 years in prison for rape and being repeatedly denied parole.

In December, a young man in Newtown, Conn., killed 20 small children and seven adults, including his mother, and then committed suicide. This tragic massacre has prompted legislators to reexamine firearms laws and quickly propose legislation that might prevent future mass murders. Much of it focuses on people who have sought mental health care. The Maryland General Assembly is considering legislation that requires mental health clinicians to report patients who are potentially dangerous for the purpose of restricting their access to guns.

The estate of a 40-year-old patient killed at a state psychiatric hospital sued the man accused of the killing and has started the process to sue the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The suit, filed Oct. 25 in Baltimore, alleges that Andre Mayo, 47, assaulted and killed Rogelio Mondragon in his cell at Clifton T. Perkins Hospital on Oct. 27 last year. It demands $15 million in compensation and $5 million in damages on each of two counts. The estate also filed a notice of claim for $15 million against the health department, which is the first step in filing a suit against a state agency.

Alexander Kinyua, the college student accused of killing a family friend and ingesting his heart and brain, has been declared incompetent to stand trial, according to court records. Harford County State's Attorney Joseph I. Cassilly said in an Aug. 13 letter that prosecutors had reviewed a report from Clifton T. Perkins Hospital, the state's maximum-security psychiatric hospital, and agreed to the designation without a court hearing on the matter. Kinyua, 21, has pleaded not criminally responsible on charges of first-degree murder and use of a dangerous weapon in connection with the May killing of Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a Ghanaian national who had been staying with his family in their Joppatowne home.

Two alleged copper thieves were arrested at Spring Grove Hospital Center on Tuesday, one after hiding for hours in the attic of an abandoned building on the Catonsville campus while police surrounded him. Dennis W. Dyer, 43, of the 8100 block of Mild Haven Road in Dundalk, climbed out of a porthole in the roof of the psychiatric hospital's Hamilton Building, which was closed and condemned in 1974, and handed himself over to state police troopers...

A man accused of beating one of his roommates to death at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center last fall was found mentally competent Thursday to stand trial in Howard County Circuit Court. Vitali Davydov, 24, who is charged with first-degree murder in the death of 23-year-old David Rico-Noyola, appeared in court handcuffed, his hands covered with large padded white mittens. Bearded and wearing eyeglasses, Davydov spoke in slow, slightly slurred speech, telling Judge Lenore R. Gelfman that he waived his right to a speedy trial, and naming several medications he is now taking.

A Crofton father who admitted Thursday that he slashed the throats of his wife and daughters before cutting himself will be treated at a state psychiatric hospital, after a judge accepted a psychiatrist's findings that the man snapped because of extreme depression and anxiety that apparently stemmed from work pressures. Julio Cesar Esquetini, 50, pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree assault and one of child abuse before Anne Arundel County Circuit Judge Philip T. Caroom.

Clarification In an article about state psychiatric hospitals in Sunday's editions of The Sun, a quote from labor lobbyist Susan Esty was not in complete context. The quote indicated that she believes the hospitals are cost-efficient in their current configuration. Actually, she said that she believes the hospitals could become more cost-efficient if they were redesigned as regional hubs.Maryland health officials have only months to make a difficult decision they have avoided for a quarter-century: whether to shut down one of the state's aging, costly psychiatric hospitals that care for only a fraction of the patients they once had.Beginning in the 1970s, with the advent of anti-psychotic drugs that made confinement unnecessary, thousands of men and women across the country left such isolated institutions.

After studying the issue for 10 months, a state health department task force has failed to decide which of three Central Maryland psychiatric hospitals should be closed.In a report released Friday, the task force recommended that one of the three hospitals -- Springfield Hospital Center in Sykesville, Crownsville Hospital Center in Crownsville or Spring Grove Hospital Center in Catonsville -- be identified for closing by June 1997. The hospital would then be closed in 2000."Despite diligent efforts, we were unable to distinguish definitive factors that would allow us to identify a specific hospital for consolidation or closure," task force chairman James R. Stanton said.

For the second time in just over a year, officials at the state's maximum-security mental hospital will review procedures after a patient was charged with killing his roommate. The killing of David Rico-Noyola, 22, at the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center is believed to be just the second homicide in the facility's 50-year history, but it comes 13 months after a similar incident. The death of patient Susan Sachs in September 2010 prompted a critical review that found workers were inattentive, slept on the job and lied about checking on patients.