But Edenfield, recently rebranded Riverside Centre, was exposed in a BBC investigation as operating more like a concentration camp than a treatment center, with fearful patients humiliated and brutalized, and employees behaving more like bullying prison guards than healthcare workers.
When the exposé aired, it “brought tears across the country,” according to Member of Parliament Christian Wakeford, who added, “The program showed some of the most vulnerable people in society being physically abused, goaded, sexualized behavior from staff to patients, falsifying medical records and patients locked in isolation for months on end.”
“They’re doing this to break me,” she said. “I’ve been treated like I’m an animal.”
Staff behavior was so bad that the BBC reported that a “toxic culture of humiliation, verbal abuse and bullying” existed at the hospital.
This month, two Edenfield employees, support worker Sheryl Price, 45, and nurse Sara Coleman, 42, were charged. Price was charged with ill treatment of four patients for a total of 14 criminal counts, with Coleman charged with five counts of mistreatment of four patients.
The pair will next appear in court in March.
Alan Haslam, a BBC reporter, got himself hired at Edenfield and went undercover for three months to expose daily operations at the hospital of horrors. What he saw—and recorded on a hidden camera—shocked him to his bones.
One 23-year-old female patient, Harley, “was restrained and dragged into a seclusion room” and “pinned to the ground face down, screaming,” he wrote.
“It was chilling.”
Harley was locked in the room, which contained only a mattress, a shower and toilet, for 17 days. After being let out for one day, she was then thrown back in for another 10—all while staff laughed at her pleas to be released.
Edenfield’s seclusion rooms are tiny—often moldy—with peeling paint, the scent of sewage and windows that don’t open.
Patients can be observed at all times, even when using the toilet.
“They’re doing this to break me,” she said. “I’ve been treated like I’m an animal.”
Edenfield’s psychiatric abuse has so horrified the nation that several employees were fired, with Neil Thwaite, head of the Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, resigning in disgrace.
The undercover reporter discovered that staff swore at patients, taunting, shaming and mocking them while they undressed, with patients slapped, pinched and restrained for no reason.
Regular observation of patients, or “obs”—required at least every 15 minutes for high-risk patients—were routinely ignored and reports falsified.
“It doesn’t feel safe,” John Baker of the University of Leeds said. “You’re quite clearly seeing toxic staff. There’s an awful lot of hostility towards patients across all of the wards, which is really concerning.”
Perhaps most shocking of all, exposés like this have happened several times before, with an eerily familiar pattern: Egregious psychiatric abuse is discovered, administrators—using lofty language—swear they are now aware of the problems and have already begun programs that will fix everything up in the very near future, and nothing happens.
Patient abuse is endemic throughout the entire psychiatric industry, but the necessary reform and patient protections just don’t take place. Promises are broken, and the so-called “mental health system” just continues on its merry, monstrous way, hiring thugs and abusing patients, until the next scandal of mistreatment erupts, soon to be quickly forgotten.
Like the notorious medieval Bedlam, where naked, chained prisoners became amusements for paying guests to enjoy, today’s British mental health system is a theater of horror, abuse and mistreatment of patients by hostile staff who violate them in horrific ways.
The BBC exposed patient abuse at the Winterbourne View private hospital near Bristol in 2011, causing a national outcry for improvement. Systemic fixes were promised, but never came. Edenfield proves that.
In 2019, the BBC exposed patient mistreatment at Whorlton Hall, where patients were abused and taunted.
Once again, elaborate apologies and promises were made but no change happened. Edenfield, again, proves that.
And that’s the problem Edenfield reveals: This isn’t a situation of a single mental hospital causing abuse and mistreatment—it’s the entire system of mental treatment facilities that needs gutting and replacing.
Let’s not pretend that England is operating mental health institutions.
People are hired at low wages, given just a day of online training and sent out to work with patients, virtually guaranteeing incompetency and abuse.
“Before starting work, Greater Manchester Mental Health—the NHS trust which runs Edenfield—gave me a one-day online induction,” Haslam wrote. “Then I was out on the ward floor, looking after patients for up to 12 hours a day. I was paid £9.51 an hour ($12.50), less than some supermarkets might pay me to stack shelves.”
Given that, it’s pretty hard to believe that the British mental health care system cares at all about the quality of people they bring in to work with patients.
Haslam filmed a nurse telling a support worker to falsify “obs” reports. “Here, sign some of these things, say you’ve done them,” the nurse said, as captured on the hidden camera. “Want to pretend you were doing obs?”
A young female patient at Huntercombe Maidenhead Hospital was held down by five staff members who forcibly fed her by inserting a tube in her nose. She vomited and the tube came out, “but they would put it back in and try to force-feed me over and over again… I felt like I was about to die,” she said.
Rape and sexual assault are common in the system. Between 2019 and 2023, Sky News and The Independent uncovered thousands of “sexual safety incidents” in British mental institutions. Nearly 4,000 such incidents were reported during eight months of 2023 alone.
So, let’s not pretend that England is operating mental health institutions.
No, it’s running gulags.
Lip service and empty promises, quickly forgotten once the next scandal or titillating news item comes along, aren’t enough. Real changes must be enacted.
Now.
