Lining up for drugs
While there is a neurologist associated with Tangram who periodically examines patients, for several months the facility did not have a single nurse on its payroll. A Tangram staff member added that staff receive a scant 60 hours of training to work with patients. Staff also perform duties which, according to that employee, should only be done by trained medical personnel. She cited as an example that all patients line up at breakfast, lunch and dinner for their medications, many of which are psychotropic or mind-altering drugs. The medications are prescribed primarily by Tangram's owner, Dr. Stanley Seaton.
But Dr. Vikki A. Stefans, Medical Director of the Acute Rehabilitation Unit, Arkansas Children's Hospital, said Tangram's liberal use of psychotropic medications is "wildly inappropriate." "By and large," she said, "the anti-psychotics like Haldol and Mellaril have a slightly higher risk of side effects in people with brain injuries. Anti-psychotics for everybody is bad." Freedom also found that Seaton admitted under oath to using unlicensed physicians to conduct medical evaluations of patients at Tangram, which, according to legal experts, could leave Seaton open to fraud charges.
Twenty-six year-old Craig Collings from Ontario spent five years at Tangram and said that Tangram was essentially nothing more than a psychiatric facility in the guise of a brain injury rehabilitation clinic where patients' rights were routinely abused. "If you come at a person who's agitated, what's going to happen? They're going to come at you because they feel threatened. When patients would feel threatened and try and defend themselves, it always resulted in a restraint."
Like Thompson, Collings said he was also physically abused, that patients were restrained excessively, that patients were given "all kinds" of medication and that Tangram patients did nothing but work from early morning until evening.
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