Reducing seclusion on mental-health wards

People with severe mental-health problems are sometimes locked in a room on their own for the protection of themselves and other people. This practice is known as seclusion and is very controversial with critics seeing it as degrading and traumatising. There is also the risk that patients might get hurt as they struggle to avoid being placed in the rooms and may come to harm as they are left in isolation; and there are also worries that seclusion can damage people's mental health. In the U.S. a treatment known as sensory modulation is used to reduce the incidence of people being placed in seclusion; this can include weighted blankets, multisensory treatment rooms - which might contain paintings, music and reading material - portable music players and optical lamps. At the same time clinicians often try to assess which things might trigger people to become severely agitated and what the patients themselves feel would be the best things to calm them down. A team of researchers from the Alfred Hospital and Monash University - both in Melbourne - studied the use of sensory modulation and an assessment scheme called Safety Tool in a 30-bed psychiatric intensive-care unit. Before the use of these techniques 65% of the patients had previously been secluded but after their introduction only 26% were. 76% of the staff on the unit thought that Safety Tool should be part of standard care.

Lee, Stuart J. ... [et al] - Sensory assessment and therapy to help reduce seclusion use with service users needing psychiatric intensive care Journal of Psychiatric Intensive Care 6(2) 83-90