Mental Patients Kept in Isolation

Despite federal and state laws that prevent mental patients from being held in isolation for extended periods of time, patients are being put in seclusion for months or years.

The Associated Press, through a series of interviews, was able to identify at least 12 patients in Staunton, Va., who had been isolated; one man was kept in a three-room suite for 15 years.

Health officials say isolation is for patients who are unusually violent; the confined space keeps them from escaping.

“The thing I think is really important to know about this story is these situations are really, really, really unusual,” said Douglas Mossman, University of Cincinnati associate director of Forensic Psychiatry Fellowship. “I’ve never heard of anything happening like this in Ohio, and I’m quite confident that the reason I haven’t heard anything about it is it doesn’t happen,”

Patients in a mental hospital are not always in restraints and heavily medicated – there are laws that limit the use of both. Ohio law states that in a psychiatric hospital a patient has the right to be free from drugs, physical restraints and isolation except in an emergency, when a patient is an immediate danger to themselves or others.

Seclusion and restraint are to be used only if the patients’ violent behavior is not worsened by either. If hospital staff members see a disruption to the ward, they would opt to not use restraint or seclusion to help a patient.

Although the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to restrain patients for extended periods of time, there is no cap on how many consecutive nights a patient may spend in seclusion. This loophole gives ward staff the ability to resign a patient into seclusion every 24 hours.

But for some, when the thought of a mental hospital comes to mind, the idea of rights and certain freedoms does not immediately follow.

“When I think of a mental hospital, I think of white walls, padded interior and people wearing white,” said Stacey Edington, a second-year psychology student.  

Other students have similar feelings.

“When I think of a mental hospital, I think of cells where [patients] are supposedly getting treatment, kind of like a nursing home,” said Chaela Zeiter, a second-year education.

The images acquired from the media may play a role in the way mental hospitals are perceived and accepted.

“It’s very natural for people to use the information available to make judgments about matters where they don’t know a lot of detailed information,” Mossman said. “That’s how our brains work.

“My point is, you and most people haven’t worked in psychiatric hospitals. The only thing you hear about are the stories that, for some reason, are news worthy,” Mossman said. “The plane that landed in the Hudson River made the news because that’s unusual, they didn’t tell you about all the planes that landed at LaGuardia and JFK and all the other airports around there.”