Interim Report on Restraint Deaths in Psychiatric Institutions – A Culture of Violence & Terrorism

Mental health staff across the United States have violently restrained patients, resulting in a reported 142 deaths in the last decade. However. in a damning admission on FOX-TV in March this year, Dr. Bernard Aarons, head of the Center for Mental Health Services, said that restraint deaths could be 10 times higher—almost 150 deaths every year.

While many assume that treatment in psychiatric facilities is caring and safe or that hospitalization is more humane than placing a psychotic person in prison, nothing could be further from the truth.

In 1998, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), a group with a 30-year history of investigating and exposing psychiatric abuse and responsible for more than 100 reformed mental health laws around the world, worked directly with the Hartford Courant in Connecticut, providing them with detailed, documented cases of restraint deaths in psychiatric institutions.

The Hartford Courant conducted a five-month investigation resulting in a five-part series exposing the 142 deaths, as identified by public agencies, advocacy offices and news accounts. The reporting team focused on deaths in psychiatric hospitals, psychiatric wards of general hospitals, group homes and residential facilities for troubled youths, as well as mental retardation centers.¹ Thirteen children had died in the past two years alone, the youngest a 6-year-old.

Only one criminal indictment had been issued in relation to these deaths.² In a 1999 restraint death, a judge ruled the death was an “excusable homicide.”

1. No Culpability or Accountability

That people die from restraint is bad enough, that those who subject them to such lethal restraint also get away with it by hiding behind mental health laws is unconscionable. These laws exonerate harm and killing in the name of therapy.

No one expects the treatment of “psychiatric” patients to be terminal. Treatment should not kill them nor should a patient die in the course of, or as a result of, his incarceration. But sadly, this is an all-too-common scenario.

On Thursday, March 11, 1999, FOX TV broadcast an alarming and shocking documentary on America’s children being killed by restraints in the name of mental health care. With no current reporting system on restraint deaths in mental institutions, many of the deaths go unnoticed and unquestioned.

Teenage survivors of this violent restraint procedure told FOX TV it was like being treated as “a piece of human waste.” Another equated it with “being raped all over again.” One girl was restrained for 24 hours a day over a three-month period; she could not open her arms to hug her father when he came to visit her. Another girl said that when she was finally released from the facility she saw an electric chair on TV used for executing prisoners and was terrified to see that it was the same chair used to restrain her in a supposed mental health care facility.

Whistleblowers from one Texas facility told of restraint procedures causing black eyes and broken bones. The method was described as “Gestapo-like tactics,” with one mental health worker saying that it was used to “get a client to do what you wanted them to do.”

In 1997, 16 year-old Rochelle Clayborne died in a Texas institution after being slammed face down on the floor and restrained by workers as a syringe delivered 50 milligrams of Thorazine into her body. “I can’t breathe” were her last words before she died. Chillingly, only six weeks prior to her death she had written to her grandmother begging to be taken from the facility and stating, “I’m going to die.” Rochelle’s death, like so many others, was ruled to have occurred by “natural causes.”

Between February and April 1998 alone, three youths, aged 11, 15 and 16, died, all apparently from asphyxiation after hospital staff had rough-handled and restrained them. The 16-year-old screamed that he was choking, that he couldn’t breathe, but was ignored. The parents of the 15-year-old girl were told they could not speak to their daughter for seven days when they admitted her to an Arizona psychiatric facility. They never spoke to her again. Within two weeks she was brought home in a coffin. The mother of the 11-year-old asked, “How could people be so cruel to harm an 11-year-old?... You’ve got to love kids, not kill them.”³

Previous Page                   Next Page