Coercive psychiatry?

Two writers in BMJ maintain that there is a global trend toward more coercion in psychiatry. Their evidence seems largely impressionistic - I'm not sure they prove the case - but it does reopen a discussion that we haven't heard much of lately.

In the bad old days mental hospitals were indeed what Erving Goffman called "total institutions." Many people were confined involuntarily, and often for life. Their lives were controlled by rules and regimentation, and many cruelties were practiced on them including shackling, solitary confinement, and destructive brain surgery. As you probably know a mental hospital was Ken Kesey's metaphor for the oppressive conformity of 1950s America in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yes, it was fiction, but it resonated.

As I have discussed here quite often, the de-institutionalization movement closed most mental hospitals. This was partly a response to the more liberal values of the post-1960s era, partly a response to the availability of treatments that suppress some of the worst symptoms of psychosis, which made de-institutionalization more feasible. What did not happen, however, was the promised second half of the program, that is the creation of adequately supportive community-based housing and services. So lots of people wound up homeless, and in prison. The BMJ editorial evokes incarceration to support its thesis, but that doesn't really work: police, prosecutors and prison guards aren't psychiatrists. What this really points to is a lack of psychiatry, not that psychiatry itself is more coercive.

However, they also argue that involuntary commitment and forced treatment are becoming more common, along with solitary confinement and restraint. The justification, in their telling, is "risk management." Mentally ill people are seen as dangerous. It seems to me that in part, what we are seeing is simply the regression toward the old regime when the promised new one failed to materialize. But there are also those who have argued that more inpatient psychiatric resources are needed, on the grounds that not everybody can make it on the outside after all, at least not all the time.

Unfortunately people who are held against their will, and who have underlying behavioral problems, are difficult for staff to deal with. And it is very hard to discourage staff from taking the relatively easy path of drugging and restraint. It happens in nursing homes as well. So I'm not sure that what we are seeing is a corruption of the culture of psychiatry so much as it is a reflection of insufficient resources being put toward a more humane response to mental illness.

But there's a lot of that sort of thing going around.