Chemically Restrained
The phrase ‘chemically restrained’ does what it says on the tin – it incapacitates patients, rendering them totally docile and at the mercy of those caring for them. In this state they can’t stand, move, or even sit up straight unless someone drags, pushes and props them. ‘Chemically restrained’, stops you brushing away a dribble, wiping a runny nose, asking for a bedpan or flicking away a fly crawling across your faces. You depend completely on someone remembering to feed you.
Vets use chemical restraint to incapacitate animals before treating them. It is called tranquilizing.
‘Chemically restrained’ is a phrase used to mask the grim reality of what is happening. It is in the same category as ‘he passed over during the night’. It stands alongside, ‘Your mother had a fall and is unconscious. We have made her as comfortable as possible.’ Or you may have come across the way soft words mask grim news if you have heard a nurse say, ‘your baby is in the hands of the surgeon now. He will do his best’, as they carry your three day old baby to the operating theatre? We don’t hold funerals, we ‘make arrangements for the diseased’, as if we were planning a trip for them to Disneyland. We understand what the newsreader is really saying when we hear, ‘hope for any survivors is slowing ebbing away after three days under the collapsed buildings’.
Bad news can be brutal and needs to be said softly. Soft words let us cope with grim reality.
Sometimes the reality ought to spoken bluntly. For instance, a promise in an election cannot be reinterpreted later as ‘a proposal’. Racism is evil and cannot be justified as ‘the right to express my considered opinion because I live in a free country’. Domestic abuse can never be dressed up in excuses bemoaning disadvantaged background, or social ineptness. A paedophile act is always an act of abuse. An execution is a brutal taking of life. No amount of ‘rendition’ words can hide state-sponsored kidnapping and covert official support for torture.
Go behind the words and see the reality of ‘chemically restrained’ for what it is.
Imagine walking into a ward to visit your mother who is one of eight old people in that ward being cared for in the final days of life. What would you do if each one of them is strapped to a bed inside a wire mesh cage, through which drips dispensed medicine, feeding tubes kept the person alive, while other tubes removed waste matter and the constant vibration of the beds prevented, rather inadequately, the development of bedsores?
What would be your response if the nurse you dragged from her computer told you keeping your mother in this cage was the best way to care for her because old people are a nuisance if left to their own devices, they want to wander around and reminisce, that it takes too much time to cater for individual personal desires and those in the cages are not fully aware of what is happening? Anyway, she adds, the beds are soft, the straps are not too tight, the wire mesh has a plastic coating so the old dears cannot harm themselves and it is easier for a single nurse to manage the group of eight this way. Deploying more nurses to give personal care would be fine, she tells you, but there is a shortage of staff due to budget cuts.
Don’t even ask about the lack of dignity, or the inability to make human contact because the drugs put her out of her mind and make no mention of the terror of feeling trapped in her body without any control and with no way of seeking help.
‘Chemical restrained’ is a wire mesh cage you cannot see. It has no visible signs other than the crying, soiled, immobilised, rag doll person who is pleading that you recognise that she is in a desperate state.
@Sabina_Brennan courageously stood up in public and described finding her mother ‘chemically restrained’, hopelessly helpless in a place that ought to have been caring for her. Sabina is calling for an end to the use of chemical restraint. She needs all the support she can muster to bring about change.
The description Sabina gave of her mother’s situation makes for grim reading. What is more distressing is the number of people like me who read her account and said, ‘I’ve been there too’.
If there is a shortage of nurses – put money into recruiting more. Face the grim reality, talk openly about it and address the issues involved. Hospices, care in the home, neighbourhood support groups are part of the solution. We have Maternity and Paternity Leave, how about introducing Ageing Care Leave to allow family members to step up and give their loved ones the deep care and respect they deserve.
How about wrapping them in loving arms, instead of entangling them in the wire cages of chemical restraint.
