'Naked women kept in cages'

2003-11-25 09:07

Prague - Mental health advocates on Monday condemned four European Union candidate countries for confining hundreds and perhaps thousands of patients to "cage beds", a treatment method they say violates human rights.

The practice is widespread in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia but considered unacceptable in EU countries, said Oliver Lewis of the Budapest-based Mental Disability Advocacy Centre (MDAC).

Lewis's group released its findings at a Czech senate hearing on Monday along with a report calling on all four countries to outlaw cage beds, which are surrounded by fence-like netting to control unruly or disoriented patients in psychiatric and social care centres.

Cage beds are "an example of the old-school paradigm" of health care because mental patients have been regarded as "the lowest priority", Lewis said.

Officials in the countries targeted by the report defended the practice as necessary in certain cases, and a Czech psychiatrist told reporters at a news conference that banning the beds "would bring more problems than benefits".

In Hungary, the report said, health-care workers have resisted a non-binding directive to phase out cage beds despite tragedies such as the death of a man who was locked in his bed in a Tororkszentmiklos mental hospital in 2000.

Runaway hippopotamus

But current EU countries "do not have cage beds", said John Bowis, a British member of the European Parliament. "We don't strap people into beds to keep them quiet, and we don't fire darts into them like a runaway hippopotamus."

Bowis, Lewis and a Czech mental patient testified at the Prague hearing.

The patient said he was punished in a cage bed for more than a week without adequate food and water, and experienced "a mixture of betrayal, fear, humiliation, powerlessness and hopelessness".

The report said investigators in Slovakia last year inspected an institution where naked women were held inside some of the seven cage beds found in one room alone.

They found in one 600-bed Czech mental hospital that more than 400 people were confined for at least some periods in the facility's 60 cage beds.

Investigators also found cage beds in three Balkan countries including Croatia. But the report did not cite those cases because the countries are not EU candidates.

MDAC called on the countries to pass laws against cage beds as "inhuman and degrading" violations of Council of Europe and United Nations treaties, including the UN's Convention Against Torture.

Bowis said health-care workers can be trained to safely restrain violent patients and prevent dementia victims from wandering away from beds at night without using cage beds. He acknowledged change "may cost a bit of money but should be considered as soon as practical".

The report said, "EU governing bodies should be aware that some of its new citizens will be confined inside padlocked cages" unless the nations' lawmakers act now. - Sapa-dpa

- SAPA