Ing Says: Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo Teaches Us What We Need to Know about Institutional Abuse
Why the psychology of obedience and situational power explains what happens inside mental health facilities — and why individuals are still accountable
I compared myself to one of Dr. Stanley Milgram’s test subjects long before I fully understood what that meant.
I was still talking to my former therapist at the time. I told her that I had always seen myself as one of the few people who would refuse — who would look at the authority figure in the white coat, hear the screaming from the next room, and say no. Not just refuse, but try to stop the harm entirely.
She struggled to understand the comparison.
As this case has moved forward, I have found a more precise one.
Stanley Milgram and the Obedience Experiment
In the early 1960s, psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments at Yale University that would permanently alter how we understand human behavior under authority.
In the Milgram obedience experiment, participants were instructed by an authority figure — a researcher in a white lab coat — to administer electric shocks to another person. The shocks increased in voltage with each wrong answer. The “victim” — actually an actor — screamed, pleaded, and eventually went silent.
The participants were not monsters. They were ordinary people. Recruited from newspaper ads. Teachers, postal workers, engineers.
And the majority of the subjects kept going.
They administered what they believed were potentially lethal shocks — not because they wanted to cause harm, but because an authority figure told them to continue, and the social and institutional structure around them made stopping feel impossible.
Milgram’s conclusion was stark: obedience to authority is not a personality flaw. It is a human default. The right institutional conditions can produce harmful behavior from almost anyone.
That finding has never been successfully refuted. It has only been confirmed, again and again, in the decades since.
Philip Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment
A decade later, psychologist Philip Zimbardo designed what would become one of the most infamous studies in the history of social science.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo randomly assigned college students to play either guards or prisoners in a mock prison built in the basement of the Stanford psychology department. The study was designed to run for two weeks.
It had to be stopped after six days.
Within days, the students assigned as guards became cruel, controlling, and sadistic — not because they were selected for those traits, but because the role, the uniform, and the institutional structure gave them permission. The students assigned as prisoners became traumatized, passive, and broken. And Zimbardo himself — the researcher, the person who was supposed to be watching — became so absorbed in his role as prison superintendent that he lost his ability to see what was happening clearly.
It took one person — a single graduate student who walked in from outside — to look at what was happening and say: this is wrong. You need to stop this.
Zimbardo was angry at first. Then he saw it. And he stopped the experiment.
One person. From outside the system. Saying stop.
That is how institutional harm ends — if it ends at all.
What This Has to Do With The Guidance Center
When I look at the leadership and legal department of The Guidance Center in Flagstaff, AZ, I see the same psychological dynamics operating in real time.
Not because these are uniquely evil people. That is precisely the point — Milgram and Zimbardo both showed us that unique evil is rarely the explanation. The explanation is almost always situational: power, role, institutional structure, and the social permission that comes from operating inside a system that protects its own.
Do they know my former therapist’s notes about me are ethically problematic? Yes.
Do they know I am telling the truth about what happened in their PAC unit? Yes.
Do they know what occurred there caused lasting trauma — and that a severely disabled man died in that unit in 2016? Yes.
Do they know none of this is ethically defensible? Yes.
And they have responded with silence, legal maneuver, and institutional distance — because that is what the structure around them makes possible. Because ego and defensiveness, once established, create their own momentum. Because Zimbardo himself couldn’t see what was happening until someone from outside made him look.
I hope to be that person from outside. I hope to make them them look.
Situational Evil Is Real — And It Does Not Erase Individual Accountability
Here is where I want to be precise — because this framework is sometimes misused to excuse individual harm.
Zimbardo himself spent the later part of his career developing what he called the Lucifer Effect — the idea that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil when placed in the right situational conditions. His book on the subject is essential reading for anyone trying to understand institutional abuse.
But Zimbardo was also clear: situational explanation is not the same as situational excuse.
The guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment were shaped by their situation. They were also responsible for their choices. Both things are true simultaneously.
The leadership of The Guidance Center is operating inside a system — managed care, nonprofit governance, legal defensiveness — that makes their choices easier to make and harder to reverse. That system deserves critique. It is getting it.
And Devon Forest, Jon Perez, PhD, Dr. Stephanie Babbitt, Dr. Teresa Bertsch, MD, Mary Jo Gregory, RN, and the full Board of Directors are also individually responsible for the choices they have made inside that system.
The psychology explains the pattern. It does not excuse the people.
What It Would Take to Stop
In Zimbardo’s experiment, it took one person from outside the system, with no stake in its continuation, to walk in and say: this is wrong.
That person exists here too.
It is every survivor who files a complaint. Every peer advocate who documents what they witnessed. Every journalist, every regulator, every politician who looks at the pattern and decides it is worth naming publicly.
It is me. It is the people who have come to Between Trust and Trauma with their own stories of harm at this facility. It is the growing weight of public and political pressure that is not going away.
The reform I have asked for is not radical. It is not punitive. It is decency. It is working with people who have lived experience. It is training staff adequately — which, given that The Guidance Center’s training budget in the fiscal year 2023/2024 sits below $20,000 while leadership approves its own salary increases, is apparently more than this institution is willing to do.
Until someone inside the system remembers how to say stop — and says it with enough force to be heard — the experiment continues.
I am not going away.
If This Mirrors Your Experience
You are not alone. What happened to you was not inevitable. It was a choice made by a provider or a facility — and choices can be documented, reported, and challenged.
File with your state’s licensing board, the Office of Civil Rights, and the Attorney General. File knowing that these bodies rarely impose meaningful consequences — because the record matters regardless.
And then come to us. Between Trust and Trauma documents what happened, names the providers and facilities responsible, and connects survivors who experienced the same pattern of harm.
One incident is enough. One person harmed is enough. We document it because it happened — not because we need a pattern to justify our pain.
“Nothing About Us Without Us.”
