There, a horrible scandal involving the abuse and imprisonment of young people at a 24-bed Glasgow facility has the nation’s top health officials reacting in shock, vowing to step up surveillance of the horror hole that is Skye House.
Scotland’s largest psychiatric hospital for children has been treating its patients like criminals instead of young people in need of understanding and care.
Forced drugging, restraint of patients, brutality, cruelty, mockery and abuse were Skye House’s dirty little secrets, recently dragged out into the open by a startling investigation conducted by the BBC.
Nearly 30 former patients at the hospital told their horrifying stories.
“It was almost as if I was getting treated like an animal,” one said.
Another, called Skye House “hell.” “The culture of the nursing team was quite toxic,” she said. “A lot of them, to be honest, were quite cruel.”
“I was constantly punished for things.”
Former patients revealed horror upon horror—verbal abuse, physical assaults, being dragged down hospital corridors, brutalized and heavily drugged.
Instead of showing care and concern, several girls said, staff would mock them for their conditions.
One young woman named Abby entered Skye House at 14 and spent two and a half years there, under the hospital’s complete control.
On one occasion, she said she was mocked for self-harming. “The nurse came up to me and almost chuckled, like a kind of grin, and said, ‘You’re being pathetic, like look at yourself.’ It felt like bullying sometimes, to the point where I just wanted to hurt myself,” she said.
She also described being heavily drugged. “A lot of the patients were like walking zombies, me included,” she said. “A lot of the time we were just sedated to the point where I guess our personalities were dimmed.”
“Without kind of trying to talk to me first, or calm me down, they would just go straight to giving an [injection],” one former patient named Jenna said. She explained that staff would drug her and her fellow patients “so that they could have an easier shift.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “they would just come up to me and grab my arms and take me away. I would just be dragged by however many nurses was needed. It was a kind of subtle punishment to teach me a lesson.”
After self-harming, two of the girls said they would be given wipes and told to clean up their own blood while staff verbally abused them. “I remember the staff member saying, ‘You’re disgusting, like that’s disgusting, you need to clean that up.’ It made me feel really horrible,” one girl recalled.
Cara was imprisoned in Skye House for more than two years. She was placed in restraints over 400 times. A clump of her hair was pulled out and she was left traumatized and bruised. “I was constantly punished for things,” she said.
Under the Scottish Mental Health Act, a tribunal made up of an attorney, a psychiatrist and a mental health worker determines whether involuntary “treatment” and institutionalization is the recommended course. If they issue a compulsory treatment order, a patient can be institutionalized on an open-ended basis, and released only upon a psychiatrist determining that they are, in effect, “cured.”
The act allows forced drugging and electroshock, a government website states.
“Those young women were children—children who needed our care and support.”
One girl described how, after she had been assaulted, she considered contacting police, but was too scared she would receive worse treatment at Skye House if she did.
Louise Menzies, a 14-year-old girl, hung herself in an allegedly “suicide-proof” room at Skye House in 2013.
Sheriff Daniel Scullion said at the time: “It’s plain that an incident such as that, which led to and ended in this tragic death, was foreseeable. The failings in these cases persisted over a lengthy period of time. In my judgment these failings were plainly serious.”
Yet the abuse continued, prompting the BBC to launch their recent investigation, which has now touched off a major uproar in the government of Scotland.
Maree Todd, minister for mental wellbeing, told Parliament, “What I heard in the program has shocked me and has put in place a sequence of events that will give myself and others in this chamber assurance that the situation has changed since the time period of the program.”
“The abuse and cruelty that were shown in the [BBC] documentary lay bare the institutional crisis at Skye House,” Meghan Gallacher, a member of Scottish Parliament, stated. “Those young women were children—children who needed our care and support.”
Dr. Scott Davidson, medical director of National Health Service Greater Glasgow and Clyde, admitted the “care” at Skye House is “below the level we would expect for our young people.”
It’s quite the understatement. Frankly, it’s below the level that would be expected for convicts in prisons.
In fact, it’s torture, plain and simple.
While Scottish health authorities are instituting extra inspections of Skye House and all other youth psychiatric facilities in Scotland to “ensure the quality and safety of our child and adolescent mental health services … both now and into the future,” much more needs to be done—and quickly.
The Scottish Mental Health Act places too much power in the hands of psychiatrists, who have proven time and time again they cannot be trusted with anyone’s “mental health”—least of all our helpless children.
The government of Scotland needs to immediately reform the process by which its people can be deprived of their freedom, with an open-ended sentence, to these factories of abuse.
