Advocates, families and legal monitors urge transfer of Bridgewater State Hospital from DOC to DMH

The Joint Committee on Mental Health, Substance Use and Recovery heard extensive testimony calling for Bridgewater State Hospital to be moved from the Department of Correction to the Department of Mental Health.

Jordan Goldstein of the Disability Law Center said, "Bridgewater is a hospital in name only because aside from its prison facility, prison exists in the core and culture of everything that happens there." Tatum Pritchard, legal director at the Disability Law Center, described repeated and, in her words, illegal uses of seclusion, restraint, and involuntary medication and noted that contractors running clinical services have been paid large sums: "based on publicly available information ... the state paid Wellpath Recovery Solutions over $447,000,000 to run Bridgewater." Mental Health Legal Advisors Committee staff and family members described Bridgewater’s conditions as prison-like and argued the population there should be under a health agency’s oversight.

Why it matters: Witnesses said the…