Whistleblower suit alleges Multnomah County’s mental health system turned into ‘the wild west’

A demoted Multnomah County employee has filed

a civil rights suit

against the county and her former bosses alleging they retaliated against her for complaining about unsafe conditions caused by large caseloads of high-risk clients with mental illness, insufficient staff and inadequate funding.

Katie Cleone Cecil, 46, contends managers encouraged her and others in the county’s Behavioral Health Division to mislead a judge about some of the criminal defendants who were not able to aid in their defense.

The employees were advised to say that mental health assessments of the defendants were in progress “even when no work had been done” and county staff had not made referrals to treatment or housing, Cecil says in her federal suit.

Cecil “refused to lie” to the Multnomah County judge, the suit says.

Judges use the county evaluations to determine where to place people who are accused of crimes but unfit to stand trial. The state faces a long-standing separate

federal lawsuit over its lack of psychiatric treatment

for so-called aid-and-assist defendants.

Cecil’s allegations highlight consequences at the county level from Oregon’s dysfunctional mental health treatment system.

Cecil filed complaints with a county human resources manager, with the county auditor’s Good Government Hotline and outside the county with the state OSHA and the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries.

In response, her supervisor accused her of being a “whiner,”


yelled at her in front of other staff, reduced her job responsibilities, altered her schedule and ultimately demoted her, according to the suit. A county human resource manager also “chastised her” for filing the OSHA complaint, the suit says.

In April, the Bureau of Labor and Industries found substantial evidence that the county subjected Cecil to different work conditions based on her reporting her concerns, according to the bureau’s report.

Cecil’s lawsuit, filed June 4 in U.S. District Court in Portland, names the county and two of her former supervisors, Kathy Shumate and Jen Gulzow. Shumate, a county program manager, left the job in spring 2024 and is manager of inpatient care and social work at Unity Center for Behavioral Health. Gulzow, the Behavioral Health Division’s deputy director of operations, left the county in April and now works for the Oregon Health Authority as a quality care analyst in the Medicaid unit.

The suit alleges the county demoted Cecil from a lead position in the Behavioral Health Division on June 29, 2023. It seeks unspecified lost wages and punitive damages.

She went on a mental health leave the day of her demotion and returned to work in early August 2023, transferring out of the Behavioral Health Division to a county clinical services role.

Cecil’s case is about the “backlash” that followed when she “pushed back” on Multnomah County’s practices involving adults with mental illness “who find themselves stuck in a broken criminal justice system,” her attorney Matthew C. Ellis said.

County officials declined comment on the suit, citing pending litigation.

In a response to Cecil’s complaint to the state labor bureau, the county acknowledged that Shumate “did retaliate” against Cecil for her complaints about work conditions but that Shumate apologized for hostile communications.

County officials denied that Cecil was ever directed to lie in court and said she lost her lead position and pay because a supervisor was hired instead.

In 2002, U.S. District Judge Owen M. Panner ruled that the Oregon State Hospital must admit defendants within seven days of a court finding that mental illness prevents them from participating in their defense. Many of them had been waiting in jail without treatment.

U.S. District Judge Michael W. Mosman later issued his own rulings in 2022 and 2023 to help the state meet the seven-day rule.

For defendants under aid-and-assist orders who are charged with felonies, Mosman set a maximum time at the state psychiatric hospital for mental health restoration at six months for non-Measure 11 felonies, one year for more serious Measure 11 felonies and up to three years for the most violent felonies based on a district attorney’s petition for the longer time.

When defendants have reached the maximum stay at the state hospital, their cases go back to the court that sent them there. The court then decides whether to place the defendants in further treatment at a local facility, appoint a guardian to help them, initiate a civil commitment if the defendants poses a risk to themselves or others or dismiss the charges.

Mosman’s ruling prompted the state hospital to release many defendants to the county, including ones with extreme mental health challenges, according to Cecil’s lawsuit.

For example in 2021, before Mosman’s order, Cecil and her team did about 168 community consultations of that population — and were “overwhelmed and underfunded” then, according to the suit. That grew to 504 similar community consultations by 2023, Cecil said.

The county received a $1.7 million grant from the state in fall 2022 to help expand programs and divert more defendants from the state hospital for county-based treatment.

Cecil’s suit contends the state encouraged counties to use the money to expand existing teams, but that Multnomah County used the money to create a new group called the Bridge Team that never got off the ground.

“As the Bridge Team floundered, the Mosman order and other changes to the law caused the work of Plaintiff’s Diversion team to skyrocket, as severely mentally ill individuals were released from (Oregon State Hospital,) flooding the local communities” and making Cecil’s team work significantly more dangerous, the suit says.

Despite her complaints to management about hazardous working conditions, Cecil and her team were told to “keep seeing more clients,’’ according to the suit.

“The Division Court was in a huge hole and was instructed to just keep digging,” the suit says.

As Cecil said money was misappropriated, the number of “untreated individuals on the streets increased and existing county staff experienced burn out and left the program,” she said.

Cecil complained to the state labor bureau that the county had no standardized tool to assess the risk of defendants and that the county’s “programs have grown and outpaced resources.”

“It feels like it turned into the wild west,” she wrote, according to state records.

— Maxine Bernstein covers federal court and criminal justice. Reach her at 503-221-8212, mbernstein@oregonian.com, follow her on X

@maxoregonian

, on Bluesky

@maxbernstein.bsky.social

or on

LinkedIn

.

About The Author