There are no therapy groups. The interactive groups are run by nursing staff, not physicians. Now, this can work when notes are taken and reported to a psychiatrist, but even so - the psychiatrist still needs to see the patients in person periodically to see firsthand how they are progressing. Or not.
NONE of that is happening at the flagship state facility. None of it. No one is being well-served by this system. Not Michael Barisone, not other residents and most assuredly not the taxpayers of New Jersey.
I was able to go up last week and have a visit with Michael and a “treatment team” meeting.
The bottom line is that they don’t do ANY TREATMENT, not for Michael, not for any of the patients! Their idea of “treatment” is to medicate, but Michael doesn’t fall into that category as he gets no medication, not any! All of the State doctors that have seen him agree that he currently suffers from no medical condition mental or otherwise and does not require any medication of any sort.
Each patient has a daily “schedule” on which all of their “activities” for the day are listed. They have a morning group for the entire unit to make sure everyone is “ok” with things in the unit, a housekeeping meeting so to speak. Not that they do anything if there is a problem though.
They have a few interactive groups that are run by the nursing staff but they are not “therapy groups” and there is absolutely no individual therapy of any sort. Michael was told at the Krol hearing that he needed individual therapy. It has been 9 weeks with him requesting exactly that therapy almost every single day, and he has gotten ZERO! That is not what they do in these hospitals even though they say they do.
Michael’s schedule does not have the majority of the groups on there as he does not need any of them. The few times they were on his schedule when he first arrived, he helped run the meetings as the staff was mostly just reading from a sheet of paper and were unfamiliar with the subject they were actually discussing.
