Yet in 1996, when it suited Willer, he appeared on a national Canadian television show, CBC's "The Fifth Estate," to attack the former director of a hospital-based brain injury program which was moving in on Willer's turf. Within months of Willer's volley, the director was discredited and Willer was made director of the Ontario Brain Injury Association. Since then, Willer has become the leading advocate of the use of U.S. rehab facilities for Canadian patients.
Willer, who describes himself as one of the foremost experts on brain injury in North America, claims that brain injured patients' recollection of abuse at Tangram could be "confabulation": "In the absence of good memory, an individual with brain injury will often rely on the cues of others to develop their answer to a question. Individuals with dense memory problems not only confabulate but once they generate a confabulation (which is generated to replace real memory, not a dishonest act), the confabulation becomes as real as any actual memory would be."
Yet numerous brain-injured patients treated at Tangram had no difficulty recounting, in detail, many startling incidents of abuse at the facility over a five-year period. And once CCHR made public its Tangram investigation, the facility came under criminal investigation by the Texas Department of Human Services for alleged abuse of patients.
The case is being handled by the Guadalupe County District Attorney's Office, which on April 2 and May 7 appeared before a Grand Jury and obtained criminal indictments against a total of three Tangram staff members, one of them the manager of Tangram's eight facilities. As a result of the cooperative efforts of the Human Services department and CCHR, the Attorney General of Texas filed a civil suit against Tangram on May 12 for abuse and failure to report abuse. Millions in fines against Tangram are sought.
For its part, Tangram vehemently denies any abuse against patients and stated it takes allegations of abuse "very seriously."
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