Options Behavioral Health Hospital, operated by Acadia Healthcare, will shut down on October 9 under a very dark cloud of at least a dozen lawsuits—and more to come—for alleged mistreatment and even rape of patients; involuntary confinement and extension of institutionalization to maximize profits; improper drug administration and a host of other nightmares.
“When you’ve got staffing cuts of this level and no security whatsoever, it’s a powder keg just waiting for a flame.”
While three other unnamed Acadia institutions will be closing as well, the company, rolling in blood money, will hardly notice: Acadia brags of having 11,850 beds in 262 treatment facilities across 39 states, and is currently planning on opening at least one more in Indiana.
But attorneys actively involved in suing Acadia in Indiana and Georgia say the corporation—which pulled in a staggering $3.15 billion in 2024 and $3.2 billion thus far in 2025—follows a despicably brutal, winner-takes-all business model that virtually guarantees patients will suffer terribly under its twisted version of “healthcare.”
Chad Bradford of the Indiana law firm CohenMalad, LLP has a dozen cases currently filed against Acadia and Options, and anticipates more.
Bradford told Freedom Magazine: “They cut security entirely and cut the staff down to bare minimum levels.… Everyone gets admitted, whether or not Options is qualified or capable of meeting the needs of that particular patient, and the stays are extended as long as it is financially beneficial to Acadia and Options to keep them there.”
By cutting back on the expense of maintaining adequate staffing and training, of course, Acadia is stuffing more of their income into their shareholders’ and executives’ already bulging pockets.
“It’s just the profit motive being emphasized to a degree where it’s at the expense of patients,” Bradford told Freedom. “The interests of the patient have to be placed above short-term profit gains.
“When you’ve got staffing cuts of this level and no security whatsoever, it’s a powder keg just waiting for a flame.”
Options Behavioral Health was first incorporated in Indiana in 2003.
The New York Times wrote that, in 12 of the 19 states where Acadia ran facilities, patients and others said the company kept beds filled by violating laws. Of course, the more beds that are filled, the more money there is from insurance, Medicare and Medicaid flowing into Acadia’s coffers.
“If there were insurance days left, that patient was going to be held,” said Jessie Roeder, a former Acadia executive.
CohenMalad alleges that the misdeeds of Options and Acadia include drugging patients into submission, admitting patients who did not meet the criteria for treatment, forcing patients to stay beyond their discharge dates, threatening patients with involuntary detention orders if they request to leave, not delivering promised or required treatment and holding patients to maximize reimbursement.
“Right now there’s no real consequences,” said Craig Inman, the father of a young female Options patient who was held against her will and injected with drugs, who has filed a lawsuit against Options and Acadia.
“They can do whatever they want to you while you’re there and there’s nothing anyone is going to do about it,” he says.
Acadia’s appalling practices have been well known for some time. Last year, Acadia paid $19.85 million to resolve government allegations after the company was caught “knowingly billing for medically unnecessary inpatient behavioral health services or for services that did not meet federal and state regulations,” according to the Department of Justice.
Of course, compared to Acadia’s enormous income, $20 million is chump change.
Acadia’s CEO, Christ Hunter, alone pocketed a whopping $7.1 million in salary, stock awards and bonuses in 2024.
“Acadia knowingly submitted false claims for payment to Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE for inpatient behavioral health services that were not reasonable or medically necessary,” the Department of Justice wrote. “In particular, the United States contended that Acadia admitted beneficiaries who were not eligible for inpatient treatment and failed to properly discharge beneficiaries when they no longer needed inpatient treatment and had improper and excessive lengths of stay.”
The problems appear to be endemic throughout Acadia’s system. For example, a lawsuit alleges that, at yet another Acadia facility, Riverwoods Behavioral Health System in Riverdale, Georgia, a teenager was raped by two other patients due to a lack of supervision by staff.
“Instead of fulfilling their grand responsibility of caring for those children in the most need of help, defendants exposed the children in their care to physical, emotional, mental and sexual abuse,” the lawsuit reads.
Attorney Amble Johnson, whose firm filed the lawsuit against Riverwoods, sees similarities between the Indiana cases and his.
“It’s largely a system of prioritizing profits over patients and shareholder value,” Johnson told Freedom. “It has become a very monetized industry in the past 20 years or so, and I think that you have to make tradeoffs to increase shareholder value.
“Obviously, children who have been committed to these residential treatment facilities are very susceptible to these types of abuses and the care of these children has just not been a priority.”
The lawsuit goes so far as to cite an entire “culture of abuse at Acadia facilities.”
It further states: “For years, children detained and committed in juvenile facilities run by Acadia like Riverwoods have suffered sexual abuse at the hands of guards, counselors, other residents and other agents of Acadia, all while Acadia has had knowledge of, and turned a blind eye to, this culture of abuse.”
But adequate staff costs money, training them costs money and having proper security costs money—money that Acadia executives and shareholders prefer to stuff directly into their already obese bank accounts.
The flood of lawsuits, the cries of patients and the results of media investigations paint a very frightening, very ugly picture of what is going on behind Acadia’s closed doors.
Whatever it takes—lawsuits, laws, actions by regulatory agencies—reasonable people, humane people, all agree that Acadia’s abuses must be stopped.
