Psychiatric Inpatients’ Lived Experiences of Physical Restraint: A Qualitative Study in Iran

Physical restraint is an intervention, which is sometimes performed in psychiatric wards.

This study aimed to describe the lived experience of physical restraint in psychiatric inpatients.

In this qualitative study, in-depth unstructured interviews were conducted with 12 female and eight male psychiatric inpatients with experience of physical restraint. The participants were at the hospital at the time of the interview. The transcript of the interviews was analyzed using a phenomenological-hermeneutic method, based on Van Manen’s approach.

In this study, four main themes and 12 subthemes were extracted. The main themes included “captivity”, “insult”, “oppression”, and “punishment”. Based on the results, individuals hospitalized for mental disorders considered physical restraint as suffering. Hermeneutically and metaphorically, they felt as if they were “oppressed slaves”, who had been held captive and awaited freedom. This intervention could traumatize or re-traumatize the patients. However, the staff’s attitude, empathy, debriefing, and giving explanation to patients might reduce the traumatic effects.

Considering the significant number of negative experiences, alternative methods should be applied in hospitals as much as possible.