An unwieldy title I’ll have to shorten.
Have you ever wondered, not only why Britain’s laws and government have been made so generous to violent patients, but also why so many other countries changed their own laws, at the same time, citing the same reasons and aims?
Obviously, I have. I’ve been scratching my head about it a long time. No smoking gun though, just a lot of clues pointing in one direction.
So, I was working on a series about ‘Safewards’ which is a ‘structured model of care’, a ‘research based approach to reduce conflict and containment on mental health wards’. My read is that Safewards was developed honestly and genuinely aimed at reducing conflict, violence and restraint. Although be careful with that ‘research-based’ sentence.
One way it’s gone badly off track is because managers, yes those tosspots again, have mandated it in all inpatient areas, credulously believing it is a one stop shop, a silver bullet to eradicate restraint and seclusion. Safewards itself makes no such claim. And, because Safewards’ moral premise fits neatly with the woke agenda, that mental patients are peaceful, harmless, Eloi who would never dream of attacking staff unless they were provoked beyond endurance by knuckle dragging barbarian nurses. That’s one of Safewards’ faults, not management’s this time.
Anyway, that series is up on blocks for now. Because I think I’ve found a strand of web which could lead me to the poisonous spider at the centre of all this.
Here’s where I got started. Exploring the Impact of Safewards on Aggression and Coercion in Psychiatric Inpatient Care: Findings From a Swedish Longitudinal Quasi-Experimental Trial.
The authors start off with some self-flagellating bullshit, about how awful and horrid ‘coercive measures’ (coded language) are ‘often’ for ‘many’ patients. Even simply observing these ‘practices’ can be traumatic. They have lifted these words and concepts from somewhere else as I’ll show. I’ve clipped the intro but it’s too wordy so it’s at the bottom of the post series. It ends with this dramatic warning of an ‘urgent need to reduce the use of coercive measures.’
‘Considering the growing call for a paradigm shift toward psychiatric care that is more person‐centred, recovery‐oriented, and grounded in human rights (WHO and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2023), there is an urgent need to reduce the use of coercive measures.’
A couple of points.
1. To me, and I accept I’m biased, calling for a paradigm shift means ‘everything you psychiatrists and nurses have been doing for all these years is completely wrong. Thank heavens we wise academics are here to show you how wrong you’ve been.’
2. They don’t need to explain what ‘coercive measures’ are because every right thinking person already knows. Like I say, its coded language.
If you were, say, writing some posts on Safewards, you might read a lot of academic papers about how it was developed and psych hospitals implementing it. If you did, you’d be struck by how frequently the words and claims found in the introduction I’ve copied for you are repeated. So much so, you might wonder if your eyes are deceiving you and you’re just reading the same paper over and over again. A little bell started tinkling in my head.
This paper doesn’t feel the need to evidence this alleged desperate need to reduce coercive measures. A good job really cos there isn’t any to find. There is, however, a mountain of evidence for the opposite – rising patient violence, staff sickness, absence, resignations etc (which I am steadily showing you). It proves there is an urgent need to protect nursing staff, instead of indulging and babying violent patients.
Ok, here is the clue. WHO and Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights 2023.
Continues in ‘The reasons why… Pt 2’
Leave a Reply