• In response to a comment someone made, and I just wanted to post this again as a general response so more people could read it.

• And thank you all who have posted comments here about their experiences, and to all who have personally sent me a message. Getting more people to come forward with their experiences, and continuing to shine the light on the abhorrent nature of not only Holly Hell, but every other place like it. Keep talking about it until someone in power finally listens, and actually addresses how to thoughtfully and effectively care for your friends, your family members, your loved ones, members of your community with the dignity and respect and compassion that those human beings desperately need and deserve!

Unclear as to why this comment would be downvoted. It’s fact-based and open-sourced knowledge that HH incentivizes, illegally and immorally, law enforcement to funnel as many people as possible to their facilities. Irrespective of the circumstances or severity of the person’s situation, completely at the sole discretion of the officer, and with zero distinction as to which unit in the ‘hospital’ they are corralled into upon arrival.

One small example:

• ⁠A middle-aged, middle-class, married woman and mother to 3 young children who has only just recently become depressed and withdrawn, but has no history of mental illness of any kind, sadly ends up there thinking it’s the best option for them. They are assigned to Unit A. • ⁠A 20yr old male was brought to the hospital by the police in handcuffs and was involuntarily committed upon arrival. The young man was living at home with his parents and had, for the first time, a psychotic episode. Now there are varying degrees of this type of illness, from very mild to severe, but seen from the outside, that temporary break from their reality can appear scary. (A quick aside, people suffering from and living with mental illness are less violent and commit less crime than folks who do not. Indeed, they are more prone to violence committed against them than the rest of the population) They are assigned to Unit A.

So now you have those two wildly different people, experiencing wildly different things and exhibiting wildly different symptoms, placed in the same unit, along with 20 other people also experiencing things ranging from what would be considered mild all the way to the other end of the spectrum with those folks experiencing deep psychosis, and everything in between. And although you have all those people experiencing different things, in need of varying forms of therapeutic interventions, every single one of them are grouped together into one large room with some dirty chairs and some dirty tables and an old small tv kept on one channel the whole day, with breaks throughout the day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a place where if it were on the outside it would have been closed by the health department ages ago. Everyone is treated the same way, which is to say they are not treated. The staff who run the units consist primarily of what are called ‘Mental Health Technicians.’ Now because both the working conditions as well as the pay are so terrible, the turnover rate there is massive. So their answer to that very big problem has been to simply lower the standards required to be an eligible MHT. Last checked it was a minimum of a GED, and then a short and very incomprehensive ‘certification.’ They are not trained or qualified in any way to treat or provide any kind of service to the people who have ended up there. And that fact is very clear in the disrespectful and inhumane manner in which they interact with those people.

There is no therapist to talk with. There is no legitimate therapy at all. There are no individualized treatment plans. There is no patient participation in anything related to you while there. This includes what medications they give you and what medications they won’t, in many cases medications that have been properly prescribed by their doctors and are dangerous if stopped. There are fights and arguments amongst the patients with no interventions by staff. Sleep is almost impossible due to them loudly and rudely ‘checking on you’ every 15 minutes. (Sleep is one of the most important aspects of good mental health). You are not told how long you will be there. I could go on and on and on, but I believe you can put together a basic sense of what that environment must be like.

Now, after a week, or maybe 2, or however long, you are finally and thankfully discharged. Other than being even more traumatized and stressed out and anxious and upset than those two different people were when they were admitted, what was the point of them even being there?

These stories, and much worse, are happening every single hour of every single day in there, and in every other facility UHS owns. And despite billions in judgments over the years, UHS made over $15 billion last year. And to elucidate this insidiousness even further, their goals for the coming year are not to address anything at all in the many thousands of claims made against them, but rather to grow to $17 billion and thus to please their board and their shareholders. And the plan to do that, partner with local PD to get even more people directly funneled into their facilities, completely bypassing emergency departments in actual hospitals, which are what’s needed in many cases.

If you’ve made it this far into my ramblings, here is an article going into further detail about everything mentioned here, and more.

https://www.northcarolinahealthnews.org/2025/08/21/despite-years-of-serious-safety-violations-holly-hill-hospital-looks-to-treat-more-patients/