A horror from the past surfaces again........
An independent monitoring group will open an office inside troubled Bridgewater State Hospital for the next two years to make sure that prison guards and clinicians continue reducing their use of isolation and physical restraints on mentally ill patients, under a deal with the state that averts a lawsuit.
“The agreement guarantees that over the next couple of years, someone will be in there watching, looking at the data, talking to the patients and staff, and really trying to make sure that people are treated appropriately as patients and not as prisoners,” Christine M. Griffin, the executive director of the federally funded Disability Law Center, which reached the agreement with the Patrick administration, said Tuesday.
The center had threatened to sue Massachusetts for what it said were widespread human rights abuses at Bridgewater, where the Globe has identified three deaths in recent years related to the use of restraints to control patients.