IN the public imagination, forensic mental hospitals — where states place the criminally insane — are hellish scenes of cages and restraints, the better to keep us safe from the Hannibal Lecters of the world.
And it’s true that these hospitals, including the one where I work, are hellish. But not because the patients are restrained. In fact, it’s the opposite. Patients, even violent ones, are often given a shocking amount of freedom. As a consequence, every day, across the country, these hospitals record dozens of assaults by patients against staff members and other patients — a situation that, thanks to expanded patients’ rights laws and state health bureaucracies, we can do almost nothing about.
To be clear, not all, or even a majority, of patients are actively violent. Just 15 percent of patients at most hospitals are responsible for 90 percent of the assaults. And yet at almost every state forensic facility I have encountered, there is an epidemic of assaults by violent patients.
[For more of this story, written by Stephen Seager, go to http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...-other-patients.html]
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