Patients in Czech psychiatric hospitals are still locked up in cages and tied to their beds, despite previous public protests a decade ago. The international organization Mental Disability Advocacy Center (MDAC) and the Czech League of Human Rights issued a study about the horrific situation in the country's psychiatric hospitals, calling for an immediate end to these practices.
Exactly ten years ago, MDAC first revealed the practices of torture and mistreatment in Czech psychiatric hospitals. The scandal received international attention and many celebrities, such as Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, supported an initiative against torture.
The Mental Disability Advocacy Center returned to the Czech Republic after a decade and, together with the League of Human Rights, examined whether there was any change since the scandal. The result of the examination was damning. Almost nothing has changed - the use of cages and bed straps is still common practice in the hospitals. The only tangible change noted was that the iron cages were replaced with net cages. In facilities where cages aren't used, leather straps are instead employed to calm patients. Children are frequently restrained to their beds by seven-point belts for hands, feet, arms and body. It is standard practice to excessively medicate patients, as is putting them in solitary confinement as punishment.
“People with mental health issues deserve support and care, not abuse and punishment," said Oliver Lewis, Executive Director of MDAC. “Substituting cages with other coercive practices is both unacceptable and unnecessary. The Czech authorities should ban these specific forms of coercion and bring its mental health system into the modern era.”
The authors of the study personally visited eight large psychiatric hospitals. They found that patients are placed in net "cages" or strapped to beds for bad behavior, and that this was partly a result of understaffing - severe but easily implemented solutions are favored when there are not enough staff members to take a sensitive, humane approach to all patients. The medical staff that was available generally supported the use of restraints, as they make their work easier. For these reasons, it is necessary to focus on systemic changes. These changes should be the complete prohibition of restraints and an increase in the number of staff at these facilities.
A former patient at one of the psychiatric hospital said: "At the moment when you are closed in the cage, you feel like an animal. As you are not even a human being, and [the medical staff] considers you as something even a little more inferior to an animal."
Dr. Petur Hauksson, an Icelandic psychiatrist and former First Vice-President of the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture, led MDAC's observer mission to the Czech Republic and noted: "Being locked up in a cage bed is for anyone who's experienced that, a very frustrating experience. Visits to Czech psychiatric facilities showed that this method of calming patients is still widely used. The only solution to this poor situation is complete prohibition of these restraints."
Juan E. Méndez, UN special rapporteur on torture, says: "There is no therapeutic justification for closing patients of psychiatric hospitals in solitary confinement, or sequestration of persons with disabilities to bed."
