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Bedlam greed, profiteering, and fraud in a mental health system gone Crazy
A shocking investigative report on the state of the private mental hospital industry reveals the corruption, scandal, and costly malfeasance that has become rampant since hospitals started using marketing techniques to snare patients.
Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
47 people want to read
About the author
Joe Sharkey
15 books49 followersJoe Sharkey’s work appears in major national and international publications. For 19 years, until 2015, he was a columnist for the New York Times — for 16 years doing the weekly “On the Road” column on business travel, and before that the weekly “Jersey” column for three years. He is currently a columnist with Business Jet Traveler magazine, and an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona.
A Vietnam veteran, he has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel. One of his nonfiction books, “Above Suspicion,” has been adapted as a major motion picture starring Emilia Clarke, Jack Huston, Thora Birch and Johnny Knoxville (and directed by Phillip Noyce), to be released soon.
In January 2017, a new, revised edition of his book “Above Suspicion” was published in print and as an e-book by Open Road Media. Penguin Random House also released an audio book version in January. Open Road also published revised editions in e-book format of his true-crime books “Death Sentence” and “Deadly Greed.” In January 2018, the revised edition of “Death Sentence” was published in print by Open Road Media.
He has written a screenplay adaptation of “Death Sentence,” which will also be published in a new print edition in January 2018 by Open Road Media.
In his newspaper career before the New York Times, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal; the executive city editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union; and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, while on assignment, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 at 37,000 feet over the Amazon in Brazil. All 154 on the commercial airliner died. His reports on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London Magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live with two parrots and a horse in Tucson — where he is also working on a new novel about the exploits of an international travel writer who hates to travel. .
A Vietnam veteran, he has written five books, four non-fiction and a novel. One of his nonfiction books, “Above Suspicion,” has been adapted as a major motion picture starring Emilia Clarke, Jack Huston, Thora Birch and Johnny Knoxville (and directed by Phillip Noyce), to be released soon.
In January 2017, a new, revised edition of his book “Above Suspicion” was published in print and as an e-book by Open Road Media. Penguin Random House also released an audio book version in January. Open Road also published revised editions in e-book format of his true-crime books “Death Sentence” and “Deadly Greed.” In January 2018, the revised edition of “Death Sentence” was published in print by Open Road Media.
He has written a screenplay adaptation of “Death Sentence,” which will also be published in a new print edition in January 2018 by Open Road Media.
In his newspaper career before the New York Times, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal; the executive city editor of the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union; and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
On Sept. 29, 2006, while on assignment, he was one of seven people on a business jet who survived a mid-air collision with a 737 at 37,000 feet over the Amazon in Brazil. All 154 on the commercial airliner died. His reports on the crash appeared on the front page of the New York Times and later in the Sunday Times of London Magazine.
He and his wife Nancy (who is a professor of journalism at the University of Arizona) live with two parrots and a horse in Tucson — where he is also working on a new novel about the exploits of an international travel writer who hates to travel. .
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September 3, 2024
A JOURNALIST CRITIQUES THE MENTAL HEALTH INDUSTRY
Joe Sharkey is an American journalist and columnist for the New York Times. He wrote in the first chapter of this 1994 book, "Reporters tend to focus best when they are moved to indignation by injustice, hypocrisy, or chicanery. The more I thought about my experience... the more determined I became to find out what was going on and... exactly who was making a buck on it...
"I now realize that the field of mental health... is riddled with hidden agendas... But I was also left with an abiding impression of the people who came forward---not only former patients, but career hospital professionals, politicians, community workers, and even psychiatrists---to take a stand and say that what they had witnessed was an abuse of power..." (Pg. 17-18)
He observes that "The psychiatry industry is working hard to expand and mandate insurance coverage to pay for biopsychiatry's new frontier. In 1990, for example, California became the first state to define mental illnesses as medical diseases and require that any health-insurance policy covering physical diseases of the brain also offer the same level of coverage for 'schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorders, bipolar and delusional depressions and development disorder.'" (Pg. 17)
He wrote, "In 1984... there were 220 for-profit psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Four years later, as insurance money flooded into the recovery treatment and psychiatrists devised new therapies based on ... greatly expanding diagnostic definitions of what constitutes mental disorder... the number of private psychiatric hospitals had more than doubled." (Pg. 11)
He suggests, "Pure economics explains the psychiatric hospitals' inordinate interest in children. The profit margin for a psychiatric bed occupied by an adult is 20 percent. For a child, it's 30 percent, since children demand less service and attention." (Pg. 90) He cites a study that "showed conclusively that length of stay in the hospital was related to the amount of insurance that was available." (Pg. 101-102)
He notes that "Since relatively few use it, most people still think of psychiatry as a practice conducted in a private office, with a physician taking notes and a patient reposing on a couch or a comfortable stuffed chair, talking through his or her problems. But except for enclaves of urban affluence, where people can afford to pay for the attention, such private practices are becoming a thing of the past. Psychiatry is now a profession mostly focused on the corporate hospital rather than the private office... office visits accounted for a mere 2.4 percent of the total ... office visits to physicians, while the profession itself has grown robustly. Virtually all of growth has been in treating new diagnoses of illnesses and disorders once considered mere personal problems---spurred by the willingness of insurers to pay for treating them..." (Pg. 179)
Later, he adds that Medicare and Medicaid "proved to be a financial bonanza for what was rapidly becoming known as the 'health-care industry,' since they guaranteed reimbursements at a fixed percentage above costs." (Pg. 239)
Although nearly twenty years old, this book still has many pertinent points to make, and it will be of keen interest to anyone studying the modern mental health system---whether one always agrees with Sharkey, or not.
Joe Sharkey is an American journalist and columnist for the New York Times. He wrote in the first chapter of this 1994 book, "Reporters tend to focus best when they are moved to indignation by injustice, hypocrisy, or chicanery. The more I thought about my experience... the more determined I became to find out what was going on and... exactly who was making a buck on it...
"I now realize that the field of mental health... is riddled with hidden agendas... But I was also left with an abiding impression of the people who came forward---not only former patients, but career hospital professionals, politicians, community workers, and even psychiatrists---to take a stand and say that what they had witnessed was an abuse of power..." (Pg. 17-18)
He observes that "The psychiatry industry is working hard to expand and mandate insurance coverage to pay for biopsychiatry's new frontier. In 1990, for example, California became the first state to define mental illnesses as medical diseases and require that any health-insurance policy covering physical diseases of the brain also offer the same level of coverage for 'schizophrenia, schizo-affective disorders, bipolar and delusional depressions and development disorder.'" (Pg. 17)
He wrote, "In 1984... there were 220 for-profit psychiatric hospitals in the United States. Four years later, as insurance money flooded into the recovery treatment and psychiatrists devised new therapies based on ... greatly expanding diagnostic definitions of what constitutes mental disorder... the number of private psychiatric hospitals had more than doubled." (Pg. 11)
He suggests, "Pure economics explains the psychiatric hospitals' inordinate interest in children. The profit margin for a psychiatric bed occupied by an adult is 20 percent. For a child, it's 30 percent, since children demand less service and attention." (Pg. 90) He cites a study that "showed conclusively that length of stay in the hospital was related to the amount of insurance that was available." (Pg. 101-102)
He notes that "Since relatively few use it, most people still think of psychiatry as a practice conducted in a private office, with a physician taking notes and a patient reposing on a couch or a comfortable stuffed chair, talking through his or her problems. But except for enclaves of urban affluence, where people can afford to pay for the attention, such private practices are becoming a thing of the past. Psychiatry is now a profession mostly focused on the corporate hospital rather than the private office... office visits accounted for a mere 2.4 percent of the total ... office visits to physicians, while the profession itself has grown robustly. Virtually all of growth has been in treating new diagnoses of illnesses and disorders once considered mere personal problems---spurred by the willingness of insurers to pay for treating them..." (Pg. 179)
Later, he adds that Medicare and Medicaid "proved to be a financial bonanza for what was rapidly becoming known as the 'health-care industry,' since they guaranteed reimbursements at a fixed percentage above costs." (Pg. 239)
Although nearly twenty years old, this book still has many pertinent points to make, and it will be of keen interest to anyone studying the modern mental health system---whether one always agrees with Sharkey, or not.
Displaying 1 of 1 review