Psychiatric patients at Corrigan
(a DMH Facility in Fall River, MA)
Are Denied Basic Human Rights
Compromised patients can go days, weeks, even months without ever accessing the outdoors. They are treated worse than dogs.
The Compromised patients at Corrigan are denied daily outdoors access as required by the United Nations, the Association for the Prevention of Torture, and by Commonwealth of Massachusetts law.
We have filed a complaint with the DMH.
Although Corrigan staff would not even acknowledge our complaints, Star Sims, JD, of DMH did acknowledge receipt.
We are currently waiting to see the outcome of administrative proceedings. We are also aware that we may never hear from DMH about whether there were proceedings or what the outcome was. That is where this website comes in.
This website is meant to keep attention on the Complaint and to raise awareness of the issues.
We will also be assembling resources on the Fresh Air laws and psychiatric patients. Click here.
Corrigan and its staff (e.g., Larry Weiner in his role as Corrigan Director of Human Rights, and Jeanne Crespi in her role as Person in Charge) are thus in violation of International Moral Standards for the treatment of detainees. The are in violation of Massachusetts State Law for the past 10 years.
This violation is purposive: they have been notified of the violations and refuse even to acknowledge receipt of the complaints. Danielle Keogh, LICSW has actively resisted efforts to call attention to this matter. She blatantly retaliated against a social work intern saying that raising this matter was “unprofessional.” She thus supports one strand of social-work practice: supporting the status quo, equating “professionalism” with upholding existing patterns of systemic domination and exploitation of vulnerable members of society.
For ten years, Compromised patients at Corrigan have been illegally deprived access to outside air and outside light. Corrigan as an institution has not even prepared the Plan required by Massachusetts regulation in 2016.
Note on photographs. From a historical or sociological perspective, psychiatric patients in the U.S. are put away, out of sight, so out of mind. Attention to the plight of psychiatric inpatients came to the public eye due to natural experiment. Conscientious objectors were allowed to work in psychiatric hospitals, as opposed to going to war. Nurses and social workers have a culture of not rocking the boat. The culture is to accept the conditions which your superiors accept. In this way each generation of nurses and social workers are coopted. Each generation sacrifices its integrity and receives as compensation the jouissance of forcing the next generation to sacrifice their integrity too.
But COs were independent. Their experience resulted in a 1946 article in Life magazine that called attention to the problem. The photos on this page (Idleness, and Despair) are derived from that article and are meant to refer to and pay homage to it. <Nussbaum here>
Site map: A more copious accounting of these issues, with both more narrative and more folk psychology, is here. Our Complaint, the version Attorney Sims acknowledged, is here. We first drew attention to the problem to Mr. Weiner here. He completely ignored us. We provided a version of the Complaint to Ms. Crespi here. We provided a version of the Complaint to “Providers” (i.e., nurse practitioners and “above”) Jose Afonso and Maxwell I. Mayer here. We have filed document requests, some of which have been replied to. See here. We have made some podcasts on Corrigan IPU, including the Fresh Air problem, here and here. For background on the Corrigan IPU (what it is, how it relates to Corrigan MHC, etc.), here. For more on why it was felt necessary to publish this website, here. What is our goal? That is, what are we asking for? What do we want for patients? Just this here.
