Restraint Measures Cause Fatalities

While treatment is not supposed to kill a patient, this is what happens virtually every day in psychiatric facilities, especially through the use of violent restraints. For decades, horror stories have emerged of institutionalized patients dying while strapped to beds and chairs, others while pinned to floors by psychiatric nurses and aides. Family members are frequently told lies about the circumstances under which their loved one died.

In a statement for a 2002 California court case related to restraints, Ron Morrison, a registered psychiatric nurse, said that patients can become so exhausted fighting against restraint, they risk cardiac and respiratory collapse.

Between 1994 and 1998 in Japan, scandal rocked the country after the discovery that private psychiatric hospitals were forcibly incarcerating and illegally restraining elderly patients. One male patient developed a potentially fatal condition after being kept in restraints for five days. Seeing he was unable to breathe, staff diagnosed pneumonia. However, doctors at a medical hospital where he was transferred, discovered that he had developed blood clots from the restraints.

The use of restraints is not designed to aid the patient. A lawsuit in Denmark revealed that hospitals using restraints received additional funding for so “treating” those patients. Harvard psychiatrist Kenneth Clark reported that patients are often provoked in order to justify placing them in restraints. In the United States, too, patients in restraints yield higher insurance reimbursements—at least $1,000 a day. The more violent a patient becomes—or is made—the more money the psychiatrist makes.

This is the truth as to why thousands of patients each year are subjected to “four-point restraints,” often after being given known violence-inducing drugs without their consent.

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