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Appleblossom
Community Elder

Less coercion in MH care

2 REPLIES 2

Re: Less coercion in MH care

Thank you for sharing @Appleblossum - a very interesting read indeed and great to see some of the improvements and strategies to reduce coercion here in Australia and around the world

Re: Less coercion in MH care

Hi Appleblossom,

-possible triggers- mentions assaults in old seclusion rooms in hospitals, no details of assaults. 

From my months at a time in old psychiatric institutions to months which turned into days at a time in public psych wards, to weeks at a time in private psychiatric hospitals, a Lot of safety concerns and chemical and physical restraints have dramatically changed. But there is still a lot of coercion (I find that an interesting and not quite apt word used in this arena). And there is even abuse which goes on by doctors taking patients off all their medications cold turkey now, or doctors dropping doses of medications massively and abruptly and traumatically as a patient transfers from a private hospital with much less medication dose controls to a public hospital which has much tighter medicinal dose controls. The pendulum swings and perhaps the swing to either side in any of these issues is not well balanced, but somewhere closer to the middle usually hits the mark of meeting psychiatric patients' needs better. 

My biggest idea for reducing human rights violations is to have psychiatrists more accountable for what medications they prescribe to an independent panel of psychiatrist monitors. My personal experience has found countless times when a psychiatrist is abusive with treatment, nurses are too afraid to speak out and hospital managennt backs their psychiatrists no matter want. There is no independent oversight panel which psychiatrists have over them as they treat incredibly vulnerable people without a voice or a say or a vote or money. Both the pharmacological straightjacketand the denial or cold turkey drop of medications are each as abusive as the other. I have personally experienced each of these more times than I can count. 

The reduction in the use of padded seclusion rooms has been a massive betterment to many extremely vulnerable people's lives. There were consistently same-detailed stories in most hospitals I stayed in of certain nurses assaulting mostly female but also male patients in seclusion rooms when the patients were locked in them for days at a time in the 1990s and earlier. An entire group of patients including myself with a nurse and an occupational therapist on a group walk also witnessed one of these repeatedly accused nurses do a similar indecent act back then on the group walk. I was so horrified I later asked the OT if she had actually seen that. She said she had. An interesting phenomenon I personally noticed was as seclusion room use was greatly reduced, even completely phased out on open wards, the nurses consistently accused of having assaulted patients in the same ways in the seclusion rooms quit their jobs. I've never seen any of them again. In my mind they were predators with their modus operandi taken away so they moved on. This was extremely positive for the safety of vulnerable patients in psychiatric wards and hospitals, in Victoria Australia which now only have an occasional seclusion room in a locked high dependency ward, never in an open regular ward anymore like there used to be. 

-Twerp

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