Note from CCHR: This article highlights the need for CCHR’s Mental Health Declaration of Human Rights to be universally adopted.  CCHR is the only organization to have drafted human rights guidelines for the field of mental health,  something desperately needed as there are virtually no rights granted to those psychiatry determines, by opinion alone, are “mentally ill.” Read the declaration here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/declaration-of-human-rights/

The Guardian, October 27, 2010

by Randeep Ramesh

Mental health patients are increasingly being locked up in hospitals without legal authority, a practice which may infringe human rights law, the health regulator said today.

The Care Quality Commission said the proportion of people in low secure beds has increased significantly since 2006. More than a quarter of psychiatric patients are now in held in low secure units (LSUs). Three years ago, the figure was less than a fifth.

Such changes in the pattern of care have rung alarm bells at the commission. It says patients were being subjected to a regime of close observation behind high fences and “airlocks”, where patients sometimes faced “unsafe or abusive practices”.

The regulator cited cases where the mentally ill were limited to “two to six sheets” of toilet paper and where nurses were unable to administer care because they were busy guarding patients.

One example saw a male nurse assigned “to preserve the dignity” of a highly disturbed female patient who was constantly attempting to remove her clothing. Other female patients in a different unit also complained that male nurses were involved “during night-time observation, bathing and toileting”.

The commission said these were “serious concerns for the dignity and safety of vulnerable [people]“. “Examples of poor practice being followed in the name of patient security included blanket measures that risked infringing human rights law, and disregard for privacy and dignity that was verging on unsafe or abusive practice,” said the report.

There had also been an alarming trend of security measures that banned mobile phones or forbade patients from preparing their own meals. The commission said, in some circumstances, this could “amount to an unwarranted infringement of patients’ ECHR article eight rights to a family and private life”.

The commission recommends reviewing the national policy of standards in such units. Matt Kinton, the report’s author, said there was a “real worry that the more mental health wards look like prisons, the less they function as hospitals where people will get better and be able to live independently”.

Kinton said one of the driving forces of this trend towards security was that the private sector had built many new low-security wards. “It is the old adage that if you build a hospital, patients will fit it.”

The regulator also noted that there was a sharp rise in the doctors prescribing compulsory treatments for mental health problems. On average, 367 community treatment orders (CTOs) have been made each month. This is at least ten times the number anticipated when the legislation was introduced in 2008.

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/27/mental-health-patients-hospital-law

Watch CCHR’s video: What We Believe, here: http://www.cchrint.org/about-us/

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New York Times
by Richard Perez-Pena
August 3, 2010

Patient advocates filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday charging that New Jersey psychiatric hospitals routinely medicate patients against their will without a review by an outside arbiter, a practice that is banned in most other states.

Twenty-nine states require a judge’s ruling for involuntary medication, according to the suit, including New York, Connecticut and other large states, like California, Florida and Texas. Five other states leave the decision to an individual or panel outside the hospital. Some states also provide an advocate to represent a patient in a hearing on forced medication.

But in New Jersey, state rules allow a patient in a state hospital to appeal medication decisions only to people in the hospital. The lawsuit contends that the internal appeal process is routinely ignored and that psychiatric patients in private hospitals lack any opportunity to appeal medication regimens at all.

The suit, filed in Federal District Court in Trenton by the group Disability Rights New Jersey, seeks a court order requiring the state to provide judicial review of involuntary medication. It notes that a prison inmate has more power to contest treatment decisions than a psychiatric patient.

The drugs forced on patients include powerful medications for conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. They help many people with those diseases function better, but can have serious side effects, including diabetes, tremors, seizures, high blood pressure, obesity, sedation, aches and impaired mental function.

“As a patient in a state hospital, it’s your legal right to refuse and go through a process, but you get severely penalized if you try,” said W. Emmett Dwyer, litigation director of Disability Rights New Jersey, a federally financed organization. “They view you as noncompliant with treatment. They give you an injection instead of a pill. And they tell you if you don’t take it, you won’t get out.”

There are about 1,800 patients at any given time in New Jersey’s five state psychiatric hospitals, and 1,000 in private ones.

Michael D. Reisman, a lawyer with Kirkland & Ellis, which is helping bring the lawsuit, said recent records from one state hospital showed that fewer than 20 percent of patients contested their medication.

But the advocates and several former patients said many more objected to their prescriptions but submitted quietly, rather than risk painful injections or a longer hospital stay. Others, they said, are too medicated to object.

“When I said no, they just shot me up instead, so pretty soon I gave up,” said Alice Hsia, 34, who has been in and out of hospitals for schizophrenia. “The times I was sedated, I would sign anything they wanted.”

Mr. Reisman said the question often was not whether some medication was needed, but rather one of dosage or a desire to try a “different drug with fewer side effects.” Some hospital

psychiatrists do not take such concerns seriously, he said, but “a judicial hearing would give the patient more leverage and force the doctors to listen.”

The State Department of Human Services, which runs the hospitals, declined to comment on the suit. But among advocates for the mentally ill, there are wide-ranging opinions on involuntary treatment.

Phil Lubitz, associate director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness of New Jersey,  said he did not see forced medication as a major issue, noting that it was extremely difficult to get patients committed in New Jersey, and that most who were presented “a danger to themselves or others.”

But Robert Davison, executive director of the Mental health Association of Essex County,  called New Jersey’s policy “beneath contempt.”

Read the entire article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/04/health/policy/04psych.html

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David Gutierrez
NaturalNews.com
November 28, 2009

Standards of care at Greek mental hospitals are still so atrocious that the European Union has threatened to cut funding for social projects if the country does not clean up its act.

“The system is in a state of reform, but I have to say that if patients are attached to their beds for hours or days, that’s totally unacceptable,” said Vladimir Spidla, the European Commissioner for Social Affairs. “For me it’s sad that this exists in the European Union.”

In 1989, a worldwide scandal erupted when photos were released of naked psychiatric patients restrained by chains in a hospital on the Greek island of Leros. Earning the name “island of the damned,” the hospital was condemned as the worst mental health facility in Europe. Since then, however, reform has come slowly.

A BBC reporter observed widespread physical restraint of mental patients at Dromokraitio Psychiatric Hospital, one of the two main psychiatric hospitals in the capital city of Athens. One woman was seen tied to her bed by a belt around her leg. When the reporter asked if the woman might remain restrained for years, a staff psychologist answered, “Yes, definitely.”

Read entire article:  http://www.naturalnews.com/027604_psychiatric_patients_medical_malpractice.html

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