“We’re here for our patients. And in the midst of all the noise, I believe we do good work.”
—Casey Webber, NeuroPsychiatric Hospitals’ director of patient experience
With her arm swollen and draining fluid after surgery for an abscess, Jessica Ravellette had a fever, was delirious and couldn’t form a sentence.
What was she doing at a psychiatric hospital—the Medical Behavioral Hospital of Indianapolis?
Well, she was transferred here from the local hospital, they told her desperate mother.
There’s a court order, they said—an emergency detention order, which legally allows them to keep patients for up to 14 days if a judge finds they’re mentally ill, dangerous or unable to care for themselves.
“I thought I was either going to die there or wake up without my arm.”
For more than three days that June in 2024, Tina Blackburn begged in vain for her daughter’s release.
Finally, she called the cops.
And when a local officer asked to see the court order authorizing Jessica’s detention, he found there was none.
Jessica was released the next day, after enduring a full week at what she later described as “the scariest place I’ve ever been. I thought I was either going to die there or wake up without my arm.”
Interviews with dozens of other patients, relatives, staff and experts echo Jessica’s nightmare, as do lawsuits, medical records and hundreds of state and federal inspection reports and substantiated complaints over many years. Medical Behavioral Hospital is part of the for-profit NeuroPsychiatric Hospitals (NPH) chain—an outfit cited again and again for egregious violations including negligent medical care, shoddy record-keeping and dangerous conditions.
For over a decade, inspectors, health officials, disability rights activists and attorneys with lawsuits have beaten a path to NPH’s doors:
- 2013: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Indiana Department of Health cited an NPH facility for staff ignorance of their basic duties, missing drug records, critical lab results delayed, and a patient left for days with an untreated infection. That patient later died. “Medical staff rules and regulations are not being adhered to,” the inspectors wrote.
- 2015: A False Claims Act lawsuit filed by a former nurse practitioner alleged that NPH founder Cameron Gilbert forbade the staff from releasing anyone earlier than 14 days (“Fourteen days is the money maker,” he allegedly said, referring to the Medicare billing “sweet spot”). He required that he personally approve any discharge. The nurse practitioner, who was suspended for daring to discharge a female patient frightened by men wandering into her room, later withdrew the lawsuit. “I don’t have the money or resources,” she said.
- 2017: Indiana health officials accused the Indianapolis hospital of failing to keep patients safe and tried to revoke its license. Instead of fixing the problems, NPH sued to block the action.
- 2018: Indiana Disability Rights tried to conduct monitoring visits as per its federal authority. NPH howled “harassment!” and filed another suit.
- 2020: Federal inspectors declared the Indianapolis hospital in “immediate jeopardy”—the most severe violation possible—after at least four of its patients died in a four‑month span. CMS defines immediate jeopardy as a situation where one or more patients have suffered or are likely to suffer serious injury, harm, impairment or death due to a provider’s noncompliance.
Each time, NPH did what it needed to operate another day. Its 2017 and 2018 suits against the Indiana health officials and Disability Rights ended in private settlements. The 2020 “immediate jeopardy” order was lifted the day the hospital submitted a corrective plan.
“This is not safe. You are harming patients.”
Today, NPH enjoys a thriving business—more than $76 million reported Medicare net patient revenue—doing whatever it likes to the human beings in its clutches with virtually zero public accountability.
Michael McNally, the chain’s attorney, dismisses questions and complaints with this appallingly cavalier pronouncement: “My experience: Nothing’s ever perfect.... Even if we ran the crappiest facility possible, it’s probably either going to be on par with or slightly better than the next alternative.”
But NPH can’t even clear that despicably low and irresponsible bar, because it has a terrible reputation among other psychiatric hospitals, too.
A dozen former NPH staff—nurses, technicians and supervisors, all now working at other hospitals—interviewed by the local PBS station on condition of anonymity, confirmed NPH’s needless prolonged detentions and confided that they quietly intervened to stop transfers from their hospitals to NPH.
Outside psychiatrists who reviewed patient records for PBS found vague, boilerplate notes, inadequate justifications for extended detentions and, in one case, a patient file that contained another patient’s records.
Two attending psychiatrists who routinely receive transferred patients from NPH remarked on the ghastly shape its patients are in. One described how patients often plead with him not to send them back to NPH. The other told NPH straight out: “This is not safe. You are harming patients.”
Both psychiatrists said they had no idea how some of the patients were still alive.
Jessica Ravellette knows what they mean.
She nearly died inside NPH’s Indianapolis facility. Now, over a year later, she still can’t get the experience out of her mind.
“I felt so helpless,” she said. “I just don’t want it to happen to anybody ever.”
