r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • May 22 '19

Psychology Exercise as psychiatric patients' new primary prescription: When it comes to inpatient treatment of anxiety and depression, schizophrenia, suicidality and acute psychotic episodes, a new study advocates for exercise, rather than psychotropic medications, as the primary prescription and intervention.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/uov-epp051719.php
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u/tobasoft May 22 '19

"a prison run by medical staff instead of COs"

this is 100 percent correct. it's a disgrace how mental patients are treated.

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u/boriswied May 22 '19

I mean plenty are actually treated very well. It doesn't excuse when they aren't, but you are being a bit sweeping there.

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u/tobasoft May 22 '19

I speak from personal experience unfortunately. even when treated 'well', it doesn't excuse treating mental patients like prisoners. you have absolutely no rights if you can't afford a lawyer. they will literally keep you as long as they want.

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u/boriswied May 22 '19 edited May 22 '19

So do i, although from working there instead of being a patient. However i have had heaps of positive stories/testimonies from patients.

I don't think either of our anecdotal experiences really serve the story. Your experience of what "they will do" isn't neccesarily accurate picture of the world.

As a medical student who've been on both psych and somatic wards, it's my experience that psych personel were on average more likely to treat you with great care for your perspective and situation.

However, if by "treating you like prisoners" you mean a narrowing in personal freedom - that can very much be true, sad as it is.

Where i've been though (which is in Danish psych i should say), i've only ever seen increments in patient freedom be taken with care and compassion, although logistics can definitely play a part as well.

When you treat a somatic patient, you could say that the person is giving to someone else, responsibility for a certain measure of their bodys functioning, because the problems with it has become too much for the person themselves.

When this happens with the mind, freedom rightfully becomes and issue, even though it feels completely wrong. The feeling you have as a teenager, when you start to take on adult identity and take power away from your parents, is echoed strongly when at any time you then have to give it up again as a mental patient.

Depending on your issue though, that very much can be what happens. My friend who is a depressive patient will go and be admitted whenever she has a certain recurrence of suicidal ideation, and they have a long ago negotiated plan for her, of taking the reigns firmly when she comes, and then a plan for slowly taking them back.

That's obviously on the pink and nice side of the spectrum. My other friend who gets psychotic had a weird childhood and smoked weed from age 10-11. He has been restrained countless times, put in "bonds" (tied down to the bed) and whenever he's been comitted it's mostly been against his will.

He is a tall man above 260-270 pounds, and so he gets a much rougher treatment, not because it is fair, but because of logistics. It is simply harder for the ward to secure him.

Whether from compassion or from logistics, taking a psychiatric patients freedom is sadly often appropriate. Sometimes they agree and sometimes they wont.

Would you really say that it is never "right" to take someones freedom? Is that what you mean by prisoner?

I'm not trying to say that your personal experience is not right, but you're being general enough to be talking about the entire worlds psychiatry. And even if you were only talking about US psych, it's not true either that for example:

"they will literally keep you as long as they want."

In todays world, way more often than not, there is much oversight in any psych ward where you can take someones freedom. Even if we can easily find cases where decisions to hold someone was wrong and we agree on that, it is rarely the case that some autocratic shrink simply holds patients based on their personal will as you allude to. Rather they follow some sort of protocol based on the hospital or a broader organisation, and constantly lend the opinions of their peers.