Lawsuit: Southwood Psychatric Hospital

“A psychiatric care facility for children and adolescents in Allegheny County is facing five new lawsuits from former patients who claim they were physically and sexually assaulted while staying there.

The legal team representing the patients alleges that Southwood Psychiatric Hospital neglected to put safeguards in place to protect vulnerable patients from harm.

The plaintiffs include both boys and girls who were as young as 10 when the assaults are said to have occurred. All plaintiffs were patients at the facility at the time of the assaults, receiving treatment for mental health issues or disabilities.

One lawsuit alleges an adolescent patient was physically restrained and raped multiple times by a staff member.

Concerns about understaffing and a lack of safety protocols to protect patients at the facility appear across all of the cases. Some cases allege children’s guardians were alerted to the abuse but were prevented by Southwood from seeing their children.

“There is not transparency at Southwood about what has been going on,” said Amy Mathieu, a Pittsburgh-based lawyer with HKM Employment Attorneys. “The kids were denied phone calls … some of them weren’t allowed any visitation from their parents.”

Southwood and its parent company Acadia have not returned WESA’s calls for comment.

Southwood’s inpatient care services include treatment for children ages four through 18 with acute symptoms of a mental health disorder. The facility provides treatment for depression, anxiety, panic and bipolar disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder among other conditions.

Pennsylvania suffers from one of the worst workforce shortages of mental health providers in the nation, according to KFF. Most counties are federally designated as Health Professional Shortage Areas due to an acute shortage of providers, which means many teens are not getting the help they might need. A 2023 survey of the state’s youth indicated that more than a third of 6th to 12th graders in the Commonwealth felt sad or depressed most days, and 16% seriously considered suicide.

“These facilities need to exist. They serve a real purpose in our community, and they’re completely necessary,” Mathieu said. “However, they need to be run in a way that promotes [the] safety and well-being of children.”

Mathieu and the Philadelphia-based firm Kline & Specter filed three other claims against the Upper St. Clair facility last year, including the case of a 10-year-old boy who was allegedly sexually assaulted by another boy staying at the facility.

Mathieu said attorneys received hundreds of calls from former Southwood patients and parents after the complaint went public last July.

Incidents outlined in the new lawsuits span from 2011 to 2025, although concerns at Southwood predate the recent claims, according to court filings.

A Southwood employee was allegedly captured on surveillance video pushing and kicking a minor in the head in 2023. According to the criminal complaint, the employee told police she was acting in self-defense. The matter remains in court.

Southwood is owned by Tennessee-based Acadia Healthcare, a publicly-traded chain of for-profit psychiatric and behavioral healthcare facilities. Acadia was among several companies named in a 2024 investigation by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee that detailed abuse at residential treatment facilities.

The United States Department of Justice announced a settlement against Southwood in 2009, resolving multiple allegations of false claims for payment. As part of that agreement, the facility also promised to eliminate the use of face-down restraints on residents and maintain staffing levels of at least 1:5 during awake hours and at least 1:8 during sleeping hours.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health performed an inspection in 2010 that found Southwood failed to provide a patient with appropriate means to file a grievance, violating Medicare requirements, and that use of restraints were not properly authenticated. The state required the facility to take corrective actions.

Mathieu said making sure that Southwood is in compliance with state-mandated staff-to-patient ratios and implementing a single-room policy for patients could prevent future harm.

She said many of the alleged assaults occurred overnight when kids were sharing rooms unsupervised.

“Our goal is that they provide that service in a safe way that provides real supervision of children and real therapeutic medical treatment of children that benefits them rather than harms them,” she added.”

New lawsuits accuse Southwood Psychiatric Hospital of child sex abuse

[WESA 5/8/26 by Kiley Koscinski, Jillian Forstadt]

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