Rawson-Neal Hospital

Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital is a mental hospital located in Las Vegas, Nevada. It opened as a 190-bed facility on August 28, 2006. The hospital is operated by the state of Nevada.

Controversy

On April 22, 2013, San Francisco's City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said that he opened an investigation into recent newspaper reports that a Nevada mental hospital was illegally busing hundreds of newly discharged psychiatric patients to California and other states. A Sacramento Bee investigative series documented what it described as rampant "patient dumping." A former patient from the hospital, who was a hospitalized there three times between 2012 and 2014, said that it was common practice. During his stay, he saw patients discharged before recovery was reached if they would agree to go to another state. The patient said he observed this many times and that patients were discharged early were sent to other states, including Maine, California, Florida and Colorado. He said that during his time there, all patients were encouraged to reach out to family members in other states if they wanted to speed up their discharge.

The Bee published a series of articles that revealed that the facility has, since 2008, discharged some 1,500 patients, some of them still mentally ill and indigent, with one-way Greyhound bus tickets to out-of-state destinations without adequate provisions for food, medication, housing, or medical treatment, a practice derisively termed Greyhound therapy. The report found that a third of the patients were sent to neighboring California, the bulk of them arriving in Los Angeles and 36 in San Francisco.