DOJ Critical of Care at St. Elizabeths Hospital -- 2006

In the year 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a report that was critical of patient care at St. Elizabeths Hospital.

Deficiencies in mental health services at St. Elizabeths should come as no surprise to consumers of those services.  Israella Y. Bash, Ph.D., one of my former treating psychologists, used to practice at St. Elizabeths.  My experience with Dr. Bash was unusual to say the least.

Dr. Bash is the coauthor of a paper titled The Determination of Malingering, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

On June 26, 2006 D.C. Council Member David Catania, Chair of the Health Committee, held a hearing on the Justice Department report.  Mr. Catania has practiced law at the D.C. firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where I was employed as a paralegal from 1988 to 1991.  Effective October 29, 1991, the firm terminated my employment reportedly because it had learned that I suffered from a serious mental illness that might dispose me to become violent.  See Freedman v. D.C. Department of Human Rights, D.C.C.A. no. 96-CV-961 (Sept. 1, 1998).

When a psychiatry patient fakes a mental illness, it's called malingering.  When that patient's employer  invidiously certifies that patient as mentally ill based on no evidence at all -- and the D.C. government concurs -- what is that called?  Mr. Catania?  Anyone?