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Former patients sue Putnam
mental facility
June 9, 2007
By Terence Corcoran
The Journal News
http://www.nyjournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070609/NEWS04/706090346
SOUTHEAST - Two former residents of
a private mental-health facility, which was fined by the state last
year for breaking the law, have filed a class-action lawsuit against
companies that run the facility, alleging they were abused
physically and emotionally.
The suit, filed in federal court in
White Plains, names as defendants companies affiliated with two
residential treatment facilities in Southeast as well as the
principals of those companies and several employees. The defendants
include SLS Residential Inc., SLS Health, SLS Wellness, Supervised
Lifestyles Inc., Chairmen Alfred Bergman and Joseph Santoro, a
psychologist and several others employed by SLS.
The lawsuit, filed by former
patients Nicholas J. Romano and Deborah A. Morgan of New Jersey on
behalf of themselves and many unnamed patients, seeks $75 million in
compensatory damages, $150 million in punitive damages and an
injunction that would bar SLS from further violating patients'
rights.
The plaintiffs, who are in their
early 20s, also claim that SLS violated the rights of its patients
under the Americans With Disabilities Act.
SLS runs residential treatment
facilities for adolescents and young adults at two distinctive
houses, one on North Brewster Road and the other off Putnam Avenue
and Route 6 opposite Drewville Road.
The state Office of Mental Health
last year fined SLS Residential $80,000 for violations of the state
Mental Hygiene Law and ordered that it stop admitting patients - and
stop violating the rights of the patients it was treating.
The OMH said SLS Residential
routinely restrained clients and kept them from making phone calls.
It also found that staff would search patients, their rooms and
packages sent to them.
Spokeswoman Jill Daniels said the
OMH has since allowed SLS to admit new patients.
She said the company has requested
a hearing, scheduled for next month, to respond to the claims of
violations. SLS has not paid the $80,000 fine and won't be required
to until after the hearing, Daniels said.
The lawsuit says money was one
reason that SLS staff prohibited patients from making and receiving
phone calls, because if patients complained to their families and
were removed, SLS would lose money.
"SLS advertises and holds itself
out to the general public as a treatment facility that provides
compassionate and effective treatment for individuals suffering from
severe mental illness," says the suit filed by attorney Michael H.
Sussman of Goshen. "... The corporate and individual defendants have
made these false representations to induce individuals suffering
from mental illness to enter SLS, for which their insurance
companies pay daily rates as high as $900."
The families of Romano and Morgan
paid in excess of $200,000 to SLS for "treatment that was harmful
and exploitative," the suit says.
The abuses that Romano and Morgan
allege to have suffered while at SLS are similar to the claims of
violations for which the state fined the company last year. The pair
allege that they and many other patients were subjected to those
abuses and were assaulted by SLS employees.
Romano was a patient in 2004 and
2005, and Morgan was there in 2005 and 2006. Morgan was placed in an
isolation room that SLS called the Intensive Treatment Room, but
instead of treating her, staff members would taunt, ridicule and
humiliate her, the suit says.
Romano said he was forced to
participate in a group situation in which he and other patients were
degraded and punished.
Sussman said the OMH findings prove
that the patients who claim they were mistreated were telling the
truth. The fact that SLS employs people who abuse patients shows
that the company can't be trusted, which is why the suit seeks the
injunction, he said.
"What's gone on appears to have
been very exploitative to the very vulnerable," Sussman said.
Reached Thursday, Santoro said he
would have an attorney call for comment, although none did.
Previously, a spokesman for SLS noted that the state's findings last
year were unlike any report SLS had received in its 20-year history
and said an overwhelming majority of patients were satisfied with
their treatment.
SLS made news last year when it
took a Pleasantville lawyer to court to keep him from protesting
outside SLS facilities.
Attorney Glen Feinberg, whose son
was a patient at SLS in 2001 and 2002, felt that his son was
traumatized from the treatment and wanted to picket SLS facilities
to warn others. Feinberg, who was supported by the New York Civil
Liberties Union, eventually won the right to picket.
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