LOGAN – A Logan County woman says a doctor who was treating her for psychiatric issues sexually harassed her.
The woman, identified only as Jane Doe, filed her complaint in Logan Circuit Court against Dr. Raymond Rushden and Logan-Mingo Area Mental Health Inc. doing business as Mountain Laurel Integrated Healthcare.
According to the complaint, the plaintiff received psychiatric care from Rushden at the Mountain Laurel facility through 2002 and part of 2023. Rushden had been treating her for several years when he began to make inappropriate sexual comments during medical visits and engage in communication with her outside of normal office visits.
“At the request of Dr. Rushden, the mature of Rushden-Doe’s conversations turned flirtatious and sexual in nature,” the complaint states. “Rushden encouraged the behavior and began to escalate by requesting and sending sexually explicit pornographic images including images of him at work in his briefs with his pants down showing his erect penis.”
One text exchange in March 2023 shows Rushden ordering prescription medication for the plaintiff’s pharmacy of choice after she had trouble filling it at another location.
The plaintiff says Mountain Laurel Integrated Healthcare failed to supervise Rushden and failed to protect her as a patient. She says the provider knew or should have known of Rushden’s proclivities because he previously had been disciplined by another hospital where he worked as a psychiatrist for “what appears to be sexual harassment and unprofessional conduct in the workplace on two occasions in 2015.”
In 2017, Rushden voluntarily entered into a consent order with the West Virginia Board of Medicine for unprofessional conduct in the workplace. He was required to complete a board-approved intensive course in professional boundaries and to pay a $2,000 fine. His medical license was not suspended for any of these violations.
The plaintiff says other Mountain Laurel employees and patients also have expressed similar concerns about Rushden’s sexually explicit and inappropriate behavior with coworkers and patients.
The plaintiff says the defendants failed to observe, supervise, diagnose, interpret, communicate, report or intervene, thus causing a deterioration of her mental state and additional damages directly related to Rushden’s inappropriate and predatory conduct.
She accuses Rushden of engaging in serious professional misconduct with a current patient. The complaint quotes expert Dr. George Brown as saying Rushden would have known the plaintiff was a vulnerable patient with serious and persistent mental illness and substance use disorders.
The plaintiff says she experienced a “substantial worsening of her mental health” directly related to Rushden’s behavior, saying she essentially is homebound and has very little quality of life. She says she now takes “no less than 11 psychotropic medications” to deal with her ongoing symptoms.
“It is clearly not within the standard of care for a psychiatrist to engage in such serious boundary violations with a current (or even a former) patient,” the complaint states. “Although text messages do not clearly state that he was also engaging in a quid pro quo situation wherein he was providing controlled substances in return for sexually oriented photos and/or videos of the patient, the messages certainly have that appearance based on the expert’s opinion.”
She accuses the defendants of negligence for breaching the standard of care and for the carelessness of Rushden’s actions. She says she has endured pain and suffering, mental anguish, grief, inconvenience, physical impairment, loss of capacity for the enjoyment of life, loss of earning capacity, loss of household services and aggravation as well as incurred medical expenses.
The plaintiff seeks compensatory damages, punitive damages, attorney fees, court costs, expenses and other relief. She is being represented by Steven S. Wolfe of Wolfe White & Associates in Logan. The case has been assigned to Circuit Judge Joshua Butcher.
Logan Circuit Court case number 24-C-109