Report: Georgia report lifted text

ATLANTA - Large sections of a report on mental health care released recently by a Georgia commission were lifted, sometimes verbatim, from a study in Michigan and two other sources, according to a report in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Seven of the key findings in the Georgia document mirror those of the 2004 Michigan study, the newspaper reported Wednesday. The report is the work of Georgia's Mental Health Service Delivery Commission.

Gov. Sonny Perdue created the commission last year after the Atlanta daily revealed at least 136 suspicious deaths and almost 200 confirmed cases of patient abuse since 2002.

The U.S. Justice Department is investigating the state's mental health system.

In a letter to Perdue, Justice Department officials recently demanded improvements to end dangerous conditions at the state hospital in Atlanta.
In addition to the state of Michigan, the AJC found portions of the report's text were pilfered from the American Psychiatric Association and the University of Texas. (See separate story for side-by-side comparisons of the text in questions).

The report from the 16-member commission was released last week after eight months of work. It credits none of the duplicated material.

Dena Smith, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Resources, said an employee there was responsible for the borrowed sections. The woman has left the department for reasons unrelated to the report, Smith said.
Commission members said they had no idea their report borrowed from other documents.

``The reason it didn't catch our eyes was this all generalizes from state to state,'' the panel's chairman, Abel Ortiz told the Atlanta newspaper.
The plagiarism was sometimes clumsy.

The Georgia report repeats language from Michigan saying the commission had provided ``a detailed overview'' of the mental health system ``in Appendix E of this report.'' But unlike Michigan's, Georgia's report contains no Appendix E.