Study Finds Psychiatric Hospitalization Erodes Service User Dignity

Research highlights the loss of dignity that often accompanies psychiatric hospitalization, emphasizing the need for mental health professionals to prioritize patient rights and autonomy.

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A new study published in Health Expectations finds service users often feel a loss of dignity during psychiatric hospitalization. The current work, headed by Amirahmad Shojaei from the Tehran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, reveals four ways service users’ dignity is commonly violated: negative guardianship, dehumanization (including namelessness, and worthlessness), violation of patients’ rights, and depriving patients of their authority. The violation of service user dignity can negatively affect treatment, lessen service users’ desire for recovery, and even reduce their desire to survive. The authors write:

“The current study’s findings indicate that the dignity of psychiatric patients during hospitalization is not adequately addressed as outlined in the Charter of Patients’ Rights. Our results reveal that healthcare providers exhibit a negative guardianship towards patients, leading to dehumanization, depersonalization, violation of patients’ rights and stripping of patients of their authority.”

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Richard Sears
Richard Sears teaches psychology at West Georgia Technical College and is studying to receive a PhD in consciousness and society from the University of West Georgia. He has previously worked in crisis stabilization units as an intake assessor and crisis line operator. His current research interests include the delineation between institutions and the individuals that make them up, dehumanization and its relationship to exaltation, and natural substitutes for potentially harmful psychopharmacological interventions.

21 COMMENTS

  1. Hospitalization erodes dignity? What dignity? Dignity implies being able to be who you are without resistance, without apology. It implies the dignity of understanding yourself sufficiently to be at ease with what you are and therefore having no duality, no self-criticism. There is no dignity in needing help from people or institutions who neither love nor understand you. To talk of dignity in this context seems absurd. Perhaps you can talk of the ever whittling down of one’s socially conditioned ‘self-esteem’ which to a large extent determines organismic happiness without having a shred of truth or reality in itself. The self is an illusion – self-esteem is the effect of that illusion on the organism. So we are so far from being able to address these problems actually and intelligently, either as a society or as a critical website like this one. We have to break through into a greater kind of destructive activity, one that will destroy the false consciousness of humanity. Any ideas?

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    • “There is no dignity in needing help from people or institutions who neither love nor understand you.”

      Now THAT’S the fuckin’ truth.

      Why do so many adults allow themselves to have so little sense of their own dignity, of their own ability to meet the demands of living no matter how painful? Why is it so many adults allow their emotional struggles to be seen as pathological?

      Psychiatry stomps on the dignity of every human being under the guise of “medical care” when all they’re really doing is dealing drugs or imprisoning innocent people. They began by poisoning the culture with demeaning labels and have since moved on to poisoning people’s brains and bodies and/or locking them up and calling this “treatment”.

      There is no dignity in psychiatry.

      IMHO.

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  2. There is no dignity in calling suffering human beings ‘service user’ either, is there. We ruin our children and then the patching of them up we call a ‘service’, and them a user of this service. Destroying our kids and fobbing them off with destructive, brutal, stupid and insane social palliative grifts like psychiatry and psychopharmacology is hardly a service to anyone. It implies that psychiatry and psychopharmacology and psychology are social gifts rather then socio-economic grifts. So there is no dignity afforded to these suffering human beings in anything we say. What I say affords dignity to no-one because there is no-one in what I say. Indeed there IS no-one. The me is the real divided up and chopped into atoms which can then be blamed for all the mistakes of the collective social process which manufactured us all out of the raw material of nature. The fact that nature always was and forever is superior in intelligence and harmony then the social process is proof that the latter is nature’s idiot, nature’s fool.

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  3. Psychiatry routinely strips people’s dignity “hospitalized” or not. Its systematic dehumanization of the vulnerable acts as a safety valve for those in power because ultimately psychiatry is not about people’s health and wellbeing, it’s about the comfort and satisfaction and feelings of power of its practitioners.

    IMHO.

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  4. Make no mistake. Many psychiatrists are essentially jailers who can if they so choose inappropriately wield power over innocent people’s lives, the mindset underneath all their skillfully manipulative bullshitting being “the cruelty is the point”. All the research in the world can’t change that.

    IMHO.

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  5. This is an emergency Mad In America writers, so I recommend you press the big red button and use the emergency weapon, which is your brains. I know it is a tall order because it has been occupied in nothing but data entry and security seeking activities all this time. I know it’s a little rusty and will take time to whirr up again, and many ghosts and moths will be flying around, but let them out through the windows of your eyes.

    Oh God, I’m still suffering from the dishonesty of socially conditioned communicative optimism. It’s my insanity, my social conditioning, so let me just be frank. Hallucinogens are your only hope my friends. Otherwise, you may as well call Dignitas and throw your brains in the recycling machine.

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  6. Face it. The unhealthy desire to infantilize other adults, aka “psychiatry”, feeds the unhealthy desire to control other adults. It’s as simple as that.

    Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that people in power, aka “psychiatry”, will ever willingly relinquish the feelings of control that infantilizing other adults inappropriately gives them.

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    • In my humble opinion, I would love to read the research that Birdsong and others have done on how mental health workers like myself are “subliminally taught to view people in psychological distress with a certain degree of contempt and most of the time are rewarded for do so.” Please send me the citations. I think I might have missed out on my rewards.

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      • In response to your doubts regarding Birdsong’s claim that mental health practitioners feel subliminal (and often unconcealed) contempt for people in psychological distress, this supercilious attitude is abundantly documented in Dr. Jeffrey Masson’s superlative study, “Against Therapy: Psychological Tyranny and the Myth of Emotional Healing.” This so-called profession tends to attract authoritarian personalities who derive no small pleasure–and of course profit–from being able to drug, electroshock, and dictate their subjective opinions on “normality” to those under their care. Please let us know if you can marshal credible evidence of your own to refute Masson’s findings and conclusions.

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