Last year, multiple lawsuits alleged physical and sexual abuse at a Missouri mental health facility. Around the same time, Grand Traverse County kids were sent there for treatment.
In 2025, three children from Grand Traverse County were placed at the Lakeland Behavioral Health System in Missouri. One lawsuit against the facility had already been filed in 2024, while two additional lawsuits were filed on May 5 and May 7, 2025. It’s unclear whether the placements occurred before or after those later suits were filed.
The largest and most recent lawsuit includes a group of 32 plaintiffs, who allege abuse from unnamed Lakeland employees and other residents while the plaintiffs were minors and admitted to the Lakeland facility. Abuse allegations were made in the suit for every year — with many years including multiple allegations — from 2011 until 2024.
Michigan children increasingly being sent out of state
Since the COVID pandemic, Michigan has increasingly dealt with youth in mental health crisis by placing children in out-of-state residential facilities. That shift happened as treatment facilities across the state have recently closed.
According to the non-profit newsroom, Bridge Michigan, residential treatment beds have shrunk from around 1,200 in 2020 to 423 total in 2025.
Of the 152 children Michigan courts placed in out-of-state treatment facilities last year, 5 were placed out of Grand Traverse County. All of those children from Grand Traverse County were sent to facilities owned by the for-profit Acadia Healthcare Company — operator of more than 277 treatment facilities across the US.
Those facilities included Lakeland Behavioral Health — along with Piney Ridge in Arkansas (now renamed Yellow Rock Behavioral Health), and the Resource Treatment Center in Indiana.
IPR reached out to Grand Traverse County’s 13th Circuit Court for comment on how the court chose which facilities to send children to. The court declined to comment citing reasons of strict confidentiality laws.
In an email with IPR, Family Court Administrator Kristyn Laughman wrote that, “The Judge makes the final decision about where a juvenile under court jurisdiction is placed. This decision must be made in accordance with court rules and statutes. Therefore, it will be difficult to talk about this issue without using real-life details, so any information would be very broad and general.”
Allegations against Lakeland Behavioral Health and Acadia Healthcare
Along with the unnamed Lakeland employees, the May 7 lawsuit named two previous employees accused of abuse. Both former staffers had faced criminal sex abuse cases before the lawsuit was filed — one had been charged with rape and molestation offenses, while the other had already pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of a minor.
In that lawsuit, plaintiff’s lawyers argue that while Lakeland was aware that their residents were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse due to their admittance on psychiatric and behavioral conditions, coupled with residents inability to leave the facility, executive staff allowed “staff members accused of sexual improprieties to continue to work at the facility” while also “inadequately investigating allegations of staff members sexually assaulting residents.”
Along with the Lakeland facility itself, the lawsuit names defendants including the facility’s top executives and their parent company Acadia Healthcare.
In 2024, Acadia Healthcare was one of four major residential treatment facility operators that were the subject of a two-year investigation by a US Senate Committee. Those findings alleged “that children in these facilities are regularly subjected to physical, sexual, and verbal abuse; inappropriate restraints and seclusions; unsafe and unsanitary conditions; and lack of necessary behavioral health care.”
That same report also found "that these harms are not isolated exceptions, but inherent to a model that incentivizes maximizing profits at the expense of providing high-quality care to children.”
In response to requests for comments on this story, an Acadia representative referred to the following statement which was first released when the 32-plaintiff lawsuit was initially filed in 2025.
“Lakeland Behavioral Health does not tolerate assault, abuse and neglect, and the kind of behavior alleged runs counter to our standards, practices, and training,” the statement says. “While we are limited in what we can say regarding patient situations and pending litigation, the two former employees cited in the lawsuit were terminated and no longer work at our facility.”
