psych ward child
For throwing a temper tantrum, 6-year-old Nicholas, who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and disruptive mood dysregulation disorder, was kidnapped from his elementary school by police and imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital.

Nicholas was held, including multiple stints in a 'seclusion room,' for three days at River Point Behavioral Health.

According to Buzzfeed, "River Point Behavioral Health is a troubled unit of the nation's largest psychiatric hospital chain, Universal Health Services. UHS was the subject of a recent BuzzFeed News investigation, which found that current and former employees from at least 10 of the company's hospitals in nine states said they were under pressure to fill beds by almost any method and to hold patients until their insurance payments ran out. Nicholas was covered by Medicaid, the government insurance program."

Once admitted to the hospital, the staff stayed true to their tendency of holding patients and did everything they could to use the state to force Nicholas to stay. This was in spite of his parents' demands to let him out.

"I didn't want him to be there at all," Nicholas' mom told BuzzFeed News, adding that she immediately asked the facility to release her son because he was so young and didn't need to be there.

"It felt like my child had been kidnapped," she said. "I can't even hug my kid and tell him it's going to be okay."

At River Point, as reported by Buzzfeed, Nicholas would be given a bloody nose by another child, get locked in a "seclusion" room at 3 in the morning, and wait more than 24 hours to see a psychiatrist, according to medical records provided by his parents.

His parents asked at least three times to take their son home — every time, they were denied.

"The Baker Act is supposed to confine really mentally ill people who are dangerous — and a kid who has a temper tantrum is not a danger to the public," said Stephen Talmadge, a lawyer and psychologist who specializes in that law and who reviewed documents from Nicholas's case, according to Buzzfeed. "What is the kid going to do, bite a stranger?"

When Nicholas' parents finally got to see their son, he'd been put through so much torment and stress that he couldn't make eye contact or even talk.

"He was out of his mind, we didn't recognize him," said his father. "It was hard to leave him there — you wanted to just grab him and run out of the facility with him."

As Buzzfeed reports, this little boy, who the state deemed a threat to society was nothing of the sort. After he was finally released from the hospital, he went back to his kind and loving self.
On a recent warm December day at a playground in Jacksonville, Nicholas was dressed in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt and blue jeans, his skin bronzed from the Florida sun. He kissed his mother and ran off to play.

At one point, Nicholas bumped into a smaller boy on the swing set and looked startled when the boy fell down and began to cry. Nicholas ran and hid under the slide.

But then he emerged and approached the boy. They began taking turns tossing a ball at a hoop in the corner of the playground. Soon, they were laughing.
The 55lb, 4′ tall 6-year-old, as described above, is the same person police, school officials, state officials, and state-funded psychiatrists all felt was a threat to society.