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The Most Restrictive Environment
The psych ward. The nut house. The loony bin.  The asylum.  Whatever you call it, it is not the place most of us want to be, yet it often becomes the dump site for the stigmatized. Although we are trending toward more blended medical-psychiatric and gero-psychiatric inpatient units that allow more medical management to take place concurrently, the ideal environment for mental health management is in the outpatient setting.

I believe in the principle of least restrictive environment for mental health care.  Some providers are confused and feel psychiatric floors should be the depository for issues they do not want to deal with or are not interesting enough for medicine. Certainly, chronic mental illness is an issue of management rather than cure, and acute-care physical health providers are often intimidated by conditions that cannot be eliminated by pharmacological or surgical interventions. Many would prefer to pass people off rather than deal with complex matters of mind-body interaction. Perhaps if some of them visited a psych unit, they might get a fresh perspective. Let's review what happens when a person is admitted to a psychiatric ward versus a medical ward:

We take your clothes
We search your belongings and lock them up
We lock the doors and windows to the unit so you cannot get out
We take your phone, e-reader, laptop, music player, and electronics
We restrict when and who can visit you
We tell you when you can and cannot talk on a common, public phone
We tell you when you get up and when to go to bed
We put you in a room with 1-3 other people in beds that do not adjust
We tell you what you can and cannot watch and when on a common TV
We take away your right to smoke
We take away  your food choices and deny outside delivery
We take away your right to breath fresh air
We label you as a "psych patient" for life with all the privileges of stigma therein 

In short, we take away your constitutional liberties.  So why do we do that?

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Created By: Jaclyn Engelsher On: Mon, Feb 18, 2013 11:45 AM

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