Reply to Doximity Request for Nominations of Psychiatric Hospitals Offering the Best Care

Most academic hospitals are staffed by trainees. Their supervisors spend only half their time on patient care, and have half the experience of clinicians.

Furthermore, all hospitals are now subject to implacable pressure from insurance companies to discharge patients after a few days. So the sole care that takes place in hospitals is to provide some eyesight supervision for dangerous patients. They are loaded up on medications with strong sedative side effects to quiet them. That way they may be discharged safely, with a lesser risk of litigation against the hospital for malpractice. Most psychiatric medications take weeks to work, since the brain is a very slow changing organ.

Upon discharge, the sedative side effects wear off after a couple of weeks, and the patient is back to his original level of distress and dangerousness.

There is no quality psychiatric hospital care in the United States. Any result you may come up with will be quite misleading to desperate families.

David Behar, MD