On March 13, 2013, police officers escorted Alex, 26, to the emergency department of a hospital in Springfield, Vermont, after he threw a chair at a staff member of an outpatient mental health facility nearby.

But when he arrived, emergency department medical staffers treated him more like a criminal than a patient, a review of public records shows. Federal hospital inspection reports from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, the agency that administers those programs, offer an account of the incident. (Al Jazeera has chosen not to publish Alex’s full name out of respect for the patient.)

In the waiting room, Alex complained of anxiety and depression stemming from a diagnosis of schizophrenia. A nurse’s clinical report stated that before his arrival, he was having trouble sleeping and was feeling confused.

Approximately three hours later, nurses shouted for the police when Alex grabbed the collar of a security guard, according to an account of the incident by a physician’s assistant on duty at the time.

The physician’s assistant, who was not named in the incident report, helped restrain Alex in order to calm him. Despite being at a hospital emergency room, he was never checked to determine if he should receive emergency care — a violation of federal law — an inspection later found. Staffers, along with a nurse manager, instead decided to press charges and send the patient to jail.

Springfield police records confirmed that he was charged with disorderly conduct and assault.

A Windsor County judge refused to incarcerate Alex and ordered that he return to the hospital for evaluation. This time, after being screened, medical staffers determined that he required hospitalization to treat an acute schizophrenic attack.

Paul Gionfriddo, the CEO of Mental Health America, a nonprofit that promotes mental health and prevention services for mental disorders, condemned the actions of Springfield Hospital. “They were not doing their job,” he said.

Federal law requires hospitals to treat patients in need of emergency care. But there are consistent cases across the country of patient dumping of the mentally ill.

In 2012, Duke University Hospital was fined $180,000 for failing to accept five transfers of unstable patients, and in 2013, Carolinas Medical Center in North Carolina was fined for failing to provide stabilizing treatment for a psychiatric patient. Last year a psychiatric hospital in Las Vegas was caught busing mental health patients out of state.

“The treatment of mental illness is and has been an unwanted child in the American health system,” said Susan Preston, a lawyer, in testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on patient dumping cases last year.

Still, it is highly unusual for a hospital to call police and press charges against patients.

Gionfriddo acknowledged that across the country, the stigma of mental health problems, behaviors associated with episodes and a lack of proper training prevent some health care professionals from properly treating patients manifesting mental health problems.

“We’ve just stopped thinking about these as simply health conditions because we’re paying so much attention to these behavioral manifestations and we don’t treat the condition,” he said. “We don’t think about treating them as the same kind of a challenge we would as a cancer patient who was in a crisis.”

While the circumstances of Alex’s arrest stand out, it is increasingly common for the mentally ill to end up incarcerated. There are 10 times the number of mental health patients in U.S. prisons and jails as in state psychiatric hospitals, according to a 2014 report from the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to eliminating barriers to mental health treatment. Criticism of treatment of mentally ill inmates has sharpened in the last year, after reports of conditions in New York and Florida correctional facilities.

Police departments in cities like Memphis, Tennessee, and San Antonio have implemented reforms, creating crisis intervention teams to better respond to problems involving the mentally ill.

For improperly handling Alex’s care, Springfield Hospital was sanctioned. In September 2013 the Department of Health and Human Services fined Springfield, a nonprofit hospital, $50,000 for violations of patient care related to that incident and a similar one a week earlier, in which the hospital pressed charges against a patient having a bipolar episode, a settlement order shows. Under federal law, $25,000 is the maximum fine that a hospital with fewer than 100 beds — like Springfield — may be charged for each violation.

Alex could not be located for this story, despite calls to state mental health facilities and communication with members of his immediate family.

Springfield Hospital said it was not able to comment on particular patient events. In an email, the hospital’s chief of communications, Anna Smith said, “Patient care and safety are always paramount.”

“We have worked hard with our staff, representatives of the Vermont Department of Mental Health and others to train and provide as many resources as possible in our emergency department, in the best interest of our patients, staff and public safety,” she said.