(Editorial) State measures to prevent abuse of the mentally ill are a late but welcome development

The Korean government has announced that it will investigate whether the isolation and restraint of patients in the country’s psychiatric hospitals is being handled properly. The move followed a gruesome report in the Hankyoreh about a patient who died after being handcuffed to a bed for more than 250 hours at a hospital in Chuncheon.

It is nothing new that coercive measures against patients in psychiatric hospitals can involve life-threatening violence. But until Hankyoreh magazine reported on the issue, the government had not kept even basic data on the isolation and coercive measures in these hospitals. Under these circumstances, how could families entrust their loved ones to the loving care of a psychiatric hospital?

The reporting on Hankyoreh is so shocking that it is hard to believe that something like this could happen in a civilized society.

In January 2022, a 45-year-old patient at a psychiatric hospital in Chuncheon died after being isolated for 251 hours and 50 minutes and having his hands, feet and chest shackled.

Even more shocking was the behavior of the hospital staff after the patient’s death. They had the body transferred to the cold storage room of a morgue about 23 kilometers away without asking the family members for their consent and only informed them of the death of their beloved patient two hours later.

These measures hardly defy common sense. And yet, when the police were sent to investigate the patient’s death, only three and a half hours later they concluded that the patient had succumbed to his condition.

Grieving family members filed charges against hospital staff for negligent homicide, but police reportedly let them off without charging them.

Isolation and restraint must be performed under strict guidelines due to the potentially fatal consequences for patients. Restraint of an adult (in Korea, people aged 19 and over) is limited to four hours per incident and cannot last more than eight consecutive hours without the consent of a specialist after a personal examination.

But these rules were completely ignored in the hospital in question. The hospital staff ignored the patient’s complaints of pain, which continued until shortly before his death.

This was not the first patient to die due to isolation and restraint in a psychiatric hospital. In 2005, a patient in his 50s died after being restrained for 124 hours straight. In 2013, a patient in his 70s died after being restrained for 17 hours. And in 2017, a patient in his 20s died after being restrained for 35 hours, sparking a social uproar.

Considering that the National Human Rights Commission of Korea has received 463 complaints of isolation and shackling in the past five years (2019-2023), there are likely many more such incidents that go unnoticed.

On Thursday, the Department of Health and Social Care promised to make systemic changes and conduct an investigation to ensure similar incidents do not happen again. We can only hope that appropriate action will finally be taken, however late it may come.

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