A new article published in Clinical Nursing Research explores involuntary commitment and treatment from the perspectives of patients and nurses in Quebec, Canada.
The current work finds that while nurses’ opinions are split on the clinical effectiveness of psychiatric coercion, patients overwhelmingly view this process as ineffective. Nurses and patients generally agreed that professional support and family involvement during psychiatric detention were “low.”
This research, led by Pierre Pariseau-Legault from the Université du Québec, additionally finds four major themes in how psychiatric detention is perceived by the participants: psychiatry as a waiting room, nurses as subordinates, emphasis on psychiatric drugs as “care”, and refusal of psychiatric treatment as resisting undignifying “care.”
The results paint a picture of psychiatric detention as offering little support to patients while causing additional distress. The authors frame this kind of “care” as convenient for medical and judicial institutions, but not helpful for patients. They write:
“Care practices come to be limited to the application of coercive power delegated by the state, including the forced administration of medication. The distress potentially induced by involuntary commitment and treatments in patients comes to be ignored in favor of compliance with the legal procedures associated with these exceptional measures. Consequently, care practices appear to serve the interests of medical and judicial institutions rather than benefiting the patients themselves.”
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