Bridgewater State Hospital is more like a prison than a mental health hospital, lawmakers are being told. Members of the Legislature’s Justice Reform Caucus said as it is currently run and managed by contractors for the state Department of Correction, the state hospital is more akin to the jails the department’s crews are trained to operate. “It doesn’t feel like a hospital at all, it feels like a prison,” state Rep. Mary Keefe said. Bridgewater State Hospital houses hundreds of males, all exhibiting severe mental illnesses, many but not all of whom have been convicted of crimes. Legislation offered by state Rep. Ruth Balser, H2985 or An Act transferring Bridgewater State Hospital from the Department of Correction to the Department of Mental Health, would do exactly as its name suggests and transfer Bridgewater from the DOC to DMH, where the staff has expertise in the care of those with mental illness. “This bill is so important because the people who are at Bridgewater State Hospital really need mental healthcare. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Department of Mental Health is the mental health authority for the state and it’s they that should have oversight and responsibility for people who are severely mentally ill,” Balser, a practicing clinical psychologist, told her colleagues. According to the Disability Law Center’s Director of Litigation, Tatum Pritchard, her group has been monitoring activities at Bridgewater for more than a decade. In that time, indeed in the last year, they’ve noticed a pattern of patients being treated with the sort of regard which would not be permitted at the state’s actual mental health facilities. “One static condition impacts everything that happens inside the facility negatively, that Bridgewater is a prison, run by the Department of Correction, and is not a hospital. Maintaining this status quo is a blight on the Commonwealth’s reputation as a forward thinking and forward acting state,” Pritchard said. According to Pritchard, the facility is not actually an accredited hospital to begin with, despite being called one and housing sick people. The corrections staff, trained to expect complete compliance with the people under their charge, often get poor responses when dealing with the very ill, Pritchard said. Rules that the mental health teams would have to regard to protect sick people do not apply to corrections staff, she said. “One of the most concerning examples of disparate treatment between Bridgewater and DMH facilities, are Bridgewater’s involuntary medication practices, which plainly Massachusetts law governing the use of restraint and seclusion,” she said. Sick patients are approached in their cells by staff behind riot shields, Pritchard said, surrounded, forced to the ground and restrained, and then injected with antipsychotic medication. In the last six months, more than 200 forced medications have occured at the hospital, she said. “That is how we administer emergency treatment in this so-called state hospital,” she said. The Department of Corrections and Wellpath, the contractor that runs the hospital on behalf of the department, did not return a request for comment by press time. Balser’s bill and an identical offer made by state Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem were heard by the Joint Committee on State Administration and Regulatory Oversight in July but have not left that body.

Calls for changes to Bridgewater State Hospital come with dark details