I’m watching Law and Order and Vincent D’Onofrio’s character has gone undercover posing as a mental patient because a patient recently died there and inmates were subjected to punitive restraints for up to 18 hours without food or water.
Has this taken place in “the law books” anywhere and if so, did the police officer get injured in any way? Has any officer tried this and died like the patient?
Examples appear to be thin on the ground.
This doesn’t assume the stratagem has never been employed (it probably has) but going undercover as a mental patient would definitely restrict an agent’s ability to investigate alleged abuse because, presumably, his movements would be heavily restricted.
It’s far more likely that undercover work in a mental ward would be undertaken in the guise of a staff member. The disturbing case of Arnold McCardle (and it is disturbing) at Carstairs Hospital in Strathclyde featured a clandestine investigation by police officers but the article isn’t specific about the rôle they played in so doing.
More common still would be the deployment of mental health officials posing as staff as in this case at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.
There’s a Swedish case that took place in the 60’s or 70’s, where a group of journalists and med students posed as mental patients in order to investigate the quality of Swedish mental health care. My memory on this is very vague, so I may have the facts wrong. It was quite the scandal in its time, in any case. If it’s of any interest, I can try to find out some actual details and cites.
That didn’t involve any police officers, though.
I believe that the classic example was Nelly Bly, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter who went undercover as a patient in New York’s Bellevue psychiatric system (specifically Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum). Though she was not a law enforcement officer, her experiences, published in newspapers and her book “Ten Days in a Mad-House”, did lead to a grand jury investigation and significant reforms.
I sometimes think that we’d see more such undercover reports, except reporters with that level of pluck and ambition don’t want to be seen as copycatting her. Pity.
The renowned animal detective Ace Ventura.
Sorry
Just read the wiki on her. Wow. How has there not been a film of her life yet? she did damn near everything.
IMDB is your firend. A tv movie in 1981, and a feature film due out in 2008 (though the details are so sketchy that I suspect the project is on hold or stopped).
Attorneys for the Mental Health Law Project have done so for purposes of collecting evidence of rights violations. I would not be surprised if police officers have done so on many occasion but I can’t say with any certainty. Usually, criminal violations by the institution or its staff are investigated by licensing & policy bureaucracies such as your state’s Dept of Mental Hygiene, or by the prosecutorial side of Law & Order ;), and criminal violations by the inmates are not likely to be prosecuted at all but rather reported as a Behavior to the institution which will treat it as a medical symptom to be addressed by greater restrictions / tighter controls, etc.
Thanks guys. Hell, if there are cases of other investigators (not just police) doing this, I’m interested in reading about them as well. The Nelly Bly movie sounds like it’s going to be very interesting.
I’m always fascinated at the extremes people will go in order to “save humanity”. It’s a very admirable thing to do IMO and I really think these people are the ones who should have award shows, not actors and singers. Real people - teachers, doctors and investigators.
It was done at 5 different institutions across the US, and led to major changes in the way psychiatric diagnoses were made.
What was “funny” wasthe non-existant imposter experiment, no imposters were sent out, yet 41 were “discovered”. It was further proof of the failure of the psychiatric system at the time.
Rosenhan has been redone. (I will look for link). In the most recent incarnation the imposters did not get incarcerated on a locked ward but all went home with psychmed prescriptions in their pockets.