Oh, sure, there’s an agency that’s supposed to be taking care of you, protecting you against abuse and mistreatment—it’s called the Office of Recipient Rights (ORR), and it exists within the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS).
But a troubling 2025 audit of ORR by the Michigan Office of the Auditor General found that agency just wasn’t doing its job, leaving nearly 600 patients at serious risk of mistreatment and abuse.
“And the more I looked into it, the worse it got.”
The audit looked into how ORR handled a random sample of 240 out of 5,032 complaints received between October 1, 2021 and July 31, 2024. They found that, although the agency is legally required to immediately investigate complaints involving “abuse, neglect, serious injury or death”—within 24 hours, according to ORR’s own internal guidelines—over 30 percent of these complaints were instead acted on anywhere from two to 17 days after being processed.
Out of the completed investigations, 16 were at least a week late—taking between 98 to a shocking 416 days. In fact, in a case where a patient swallowed “construction hardware”—ultimately requiring surgery to remove it—while allegedly under one-on-one supervision, it took more than a year to finish the investigation.
The ORR blamed the number of complaints received, staffing errors and lack of employee availability for the unacceptable delays.
Michigan State Senator Michael Webber originally requested the audit “based on serious concerns over patient care and a disturbing lack of transparency from the department in charge of our state psychiatric hospitals.”
“And the more I looked into it, the worse it got,” he said. “Parents and families deserve answers.… The bottom line is that if the department had been doing its job, this audit wouldn’t have been needed.”
Obviously the department hasn’t been doing its job, but the question no one is asking is: “Why?”
Is it a case of understaffing? Possibly that is an element, since ORR had 25 employees as of April and received over 5,000 complaints between October 2021 and July 2024.
But that’s hardly enough to explain the full extent of the problems the audit uncovered.
So, is it incompetency?
A shrugging, uncaring attitude toward actually doing a good job?
A desire to make Michigan psychiatric “treatment” look better than it really is?
Or might it be something more sinister—and might they really have something to hide?
That last argument is strengthened by the audit’s discovery that while all state hospitals have video surveillance cameras, the cameras were often non-functional or turned off, and audio recording was either unavailable or unreliable.
“In nearly half of the cases reviewed, video cameras that could have provided the truth weren’t functioning.”
In 28 out of 63 investigations, officials said video or audio evidence would have aided their investigation.
“The audit sheds light on why recipient rights complaints were going unanswered and that the department failed to properly investigate claims of abuse, neglect or even death in a timely manner,” Webber said. “In nearly half of the cases reviewed, video cameras that could have provided the truth weren’t functioning.”
Why would surveillance cameras not be working—or be turned off—unless someone was trying to hide something?
It’s not that abuse and mistreatment of patients is unheard of in the “mental health” industry. Actually, it’s disturbingly and horribly common.
In a letter to Michigan Department of Health and Human Services Director Elizabeth Hertel, Webber wrote: “I have continued to investigate your department’s management of our state hospital system. The deeper I look, the worse it gets—patient escapes, an unannounced active shooter drill, violent attacks, settled lawsuits, serious concerns over nutritional support and recipient rights complaints going unanswered.”
Patient mistreatment has, indeed, run wild in Michigan’s psychiatric hospitals.
So maybe they really do have something serious to hide—something serious enough to cause the ORR to accept unworking surveillance cameras and drastically slow action in dealing with complaints.
But it gets even stickier: Date stamps were missing on over 10 percent of the audited complaints “precluding us from determining whether ORR’s actions were timely,” the audit reads.
It appeared to be an attempt to hide when the complaints were filed, received or processed in order to make it look like the ORR was operating properly, quickly and efficiently when, in fact, it was not.
That’s why legislators are pushing for bills to add advocacy group members to the Recipient Rights Advisory Committee—which acts in an advisory and supervisory capacity to the ORR—and to provide patients with a written explanation of their rights.
“Right now, the council is made up of people that are just kind of looking inward, that are trying to protect themselves, trying to protect the system,” Webber said. “There is an immediate need for stronger oversight and accountability by [the Michigan legislature] for those at MDHHS who are charged with protecting our most vulnerable patients.”
Good idea—let’s take action to stop the abuses.
But, more importantly, let’s find out why they happened in the first place.
Maybe then we can stop them from ever happening again.
