Inside the Rural Psychiatric Hospital Staff Call a '21st Century Asylum' [View all]

On the morning of April 14, at the Meadows Psychiatric Center in Centre Hall, Pennsylvania, a 28-year-old man named Thomas Birkl allegedly walked up to a mental health technician and punched her in the face.

Birkl had been “acting out and throwing food around the facility,” according to a police affidavit. While the woman was “cleaning up the mess [Birkl] had created,” he hit her “with a closed fist,” and then proceeded to hit her two more times in the head. When another worker tried to intervene, Birkl also hit that worker on her back and head, police alleged.

Birkl was arrested and charged with two counts of felony assault; both women were sent to the hospital with head injuries, and the second worker complained of numbness in her left arm.

A dozen current and former workers who spoke to VICE News said the incident was far from a one-off. Instead, they describe Meadows as a facility rife with violence directed at both workers and other patients, in poor condition, and providing less than the bare minimum of resources to patients.

“It’s like a 21st century asylum,” Jordan Zimmerman, a mental health technician who worked at Meadows from October 2021 until May, told VICE News. “Patients are telling me that they would be better off where they were, that this place is making them worse.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzdmm/meadows-psychiatric-hospital-pennsylvania

Long, but worth the read. This is why NO health care should be outsourced to private entities.