When Kenneth Hass died at the Oregon State Hospital on March 18, 2025, he had been in a solitary seclusion room for more than seven months. That’s roughly 250 days more than the 24 hours that usually constitutes an upper bound for seclusion of psychiatric patients.
Hass’ death spurred multiple investigations, including from two outside agencies, which found the hospital’s seclusion practices were extremely problematic. And federal data show that those problems pushed the hospital and the state to have among the highest rates of seclusion among the nearly 1,500 inpatient psychiatric facilities tracked for quality.
The Oregonian/OregonLive’s months-long investigation involved dozens of interviews with current and former hospital staff, meetings with hospital officials, talks with Hass’ family members and hours spent reviewing more than 500 pages of documentation of Hass’ treatment and analyzing state and federal data…