Treatment Abuse, Behavior Modification, Thought Reform > Brat Camp

DATELINE TONIGHT: Restraint Deaths

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Deborah:
Excellent Article on Alternatives to Restraint
Excerpt:

"Children who are victims or witnesses to abuse experience significant changes in the way they regulate their emotions over time, creating all kinds of problems as they get older," Huckshorn says. And yet as these children escape violent, abusive surroundings, they are all too often subject to violence in a venue designed to protect them.

"I think we've confused what's therapeutic in terms of intervention," says Janice LeBel, Director of Program Management for the Child and Adolescent Division of Massachusetts's Department of Mental Health (DMH). "There was a tacit belief that containing children, setting harsh limits, and imposing a physical restraint or seclusion was somehow therapeutic. How we got the idea that meeting a child's history with violence was somehow going to be palliative and restorative, we don't know."

If a child's past is the powder keg that makes potential conflict so explosive, it's often the staff who provide the spark. "In reviewing restraint episodes involving children, we noticed a pattern," says Nan Stromberg, Director of Nursing and Licensing for Massachusetts DMH. "When kids were in trouble and in distress, the staff would set limits, and the kids would then become more agitated--a recipe for restraint."

"Research that looks at why restraint increases [stress] points to the phenomenon of counteraggression," says Paul Jones, Staff Development Coordinator at Home of the Innocents in Louisville, Kentucky. "When you feel like you're being attacked, there may be an [instinctive] reaction, and a staff member [may be contributing to that situation]. Counteraggression prevents people from being able to let those verbal assaults or other things go."

"Everyone [is vulnerable to counteraggression], whether they admit it or not," Jones warns, "but the extent to which it happens decreases with experience and training."

When Stromberg and LeBel decided to investigate the backgrounds of children involved in the most restraints, they found that more than 85% had significantly well-documented trauma histories.

"These kids weren't seeking out restraint, they were traumatized," Stromberg says, "and their needs were being expressed and being poorly met. Restraint was not only countertherapeutic, it was [repeating] the abuse they had already experienced. Once we understood that was a critical variable, we were forced to step back and do business in a different way."

At New York's Bellevue Hospital, where restraint is not used at all in the child unit, and only rarely in the adolescent unit, Stromberg and LeBel found a staff committed to doing whatever it took to see a child through a crisis by talking through the situation.

"In the adolescent unit, we saw a remarkable example where a girl was very out of control, pounding the wall," Stromberg says. "Instead of offering the usual 'You've got to lower your voice and get in control,' the nurse manager was validating her anger, saying, 'I know you're angry, and that makes sense--I'd be angry too.'" The staff were able to escort the other children from the room, and in that quieter setting, the situation was quickly diffused.

But to the DMH officials, it all seemed too simple. "We grilled the directors," LeBel says, "looking at numbers of staff and training and how much they paid their workers, figuring there had to be some big difference that allowed them to be restraint free, but there wasn't one. But there was crystal-clear, rock-solid leadership [committed to finding another way], and a group of people who understood they could negotiate any kind of crisis without resorting to restraint."


Entire Article at NoSpank:
http://nospank.net/kirkwd.htm

Nihilanthic:
I think the restrainers need to some mat-time against submission grapplers so they know what its like to be on the receiving end of it  :roll:

Seriously. Drag in a college wrestler, a Judo black belt or a BJJ blue belt and see what happens.
It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues

--Abraham Lincoln
--- End quote ---

Deborah:
The rest of the article goes into detail about how to curtail restraints. It outlines much of what you just described.

Nihilanthic:
The issue is that the whole restraint thing has become a mechanism by those children to assert whatever power they have left, to spite you (er, the staff), and test you(staff..). Its like kid vs adult sparring for them... they know they cant win but they dont want to feel totally inept and helpless, so to spite them they force you to do it.

Why do you think they get into them so damn much?

Restraint really needs to just be phased out as much as possible. I see people restrain kids for bullshit reasons all the time - including insults or acting out but not at a danger to anyone. Meh, this has jogged my memory and reminded me of my couple-month stint at some bullshit county-run miniprogram called "bridges" and its locking 'time out room' (with a spring so you have to hold the lock or it flies open because some kid died from smoke while locked in there during a fire) and illegal restraints on some of the more fucked up kids, inculding a basket restrained kid being sat on by a fat orderly while everyone laughed during a field trip.

I was out pretty soon because I wasnt "bipolar" or mentally messed up AT ALL. I had the most inept teacher I've ever even heard of, and she literally did nothing. My parents were in the principle's office daily becuase of the shit happening and her lack of ability to control the class room or keep the little bastards off me.

Hell, just heard this from my mom after telling her about it. One time after I had been shoved over on some stumps left from a bush being cut down to ground level in the playground (this was 5th grade) and my back bleeding, I showed the injury and my bloody shirt to the teacher, who was standing around with other teachers jabbering. She looked at me like "wtf do you expect me to do?" and I blew up. Later in the priciples office infront of everyone I chewed her out for letting so much appen to me and she cried and made a scene.

I got the boot and the fake 'diagnosis' becuase they couldnt do their job and shooed me off. The school work at bridges was so simplistic it was insulting.... ugh. I still remember how some 20-something bitch followed me around in classes all day and the teachers were intentionally told to let the kids start shit with me to see how I'd react, including someone writing "Fuck you Chris" on a table... and now that I remember it it was in an adults hand writing, and that bitch was just scribbling away~


:flame: Just incase people dont know me well who are reading this thread, the system made me what I am today. Its a broken system that feeds the wilderness camps, TBS programs, and after-care programs and the cults for the inept parents... and makes adults like me out of innocent children.
Religion is a byproduct of fear. For much of human history, it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn't killing people in the name of God a pretty good definition of insanity?
--Arthur C. Clarke, author
--- End quote ---

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