Acadia Healthcare

Acadia Healthcare, one of the largest psychiatric hospital chains in the United States, has repeatedly held patients against their will to maximize insurance payouts, according to a recent investigation conducted by The New York Times.

The Times investigation found that Acadia, whose stock is valued at $7 billion, lured patients into its facilities and held them against their will, even when doing so was not medically necessary. According to the Times, in at least 12 of the 19 states where Acadia operates psychiatric hospitals, dozens of patients, employees and police officers alerted authorities that the company was detaining people in ways that violated the law. In some cases, “patients arrived at emergency rooms seeking routine mental health care, only to find themselves sent to Acadia facilities and locked in.”

In one situation reported in the article, a social worker spent six days inside an Acadia hospital in Florida after she tried to get her bipolar medications adjusted. In another, a woman who worked 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 interviews with 50 current and former executives and staff members of Acadia, patients were often held against their will for financial reasons rather than medical ones. The employees told The Times that Acadia, which charges $2,200 a day for some patients, deployed an array of strategies to persuade insurers to cover longer stays, including exaggerating symptoms, tweaking medication dosages, and claiming patients were not well enough to leave because they did not finish a meal. According to the article, unless the patients or their families hired lawyers, Acadia often holds them until their insurance runs out. “We were keeping people who didn’t need to be there,” said Lexie Reid, a psychiatric nurse who worked at an Acadia facility in Florida from 2021 to 2022.

If you or a family member has suffered physical, emotional, or sexual abuse at an Acadia Healthcare facility, call us today at 305-984-6974 to learn more about your legal rights and potential case. You may also contact us confidentially through our website.