“Japanese psychiatric patients are nearly 270 times as likely to be physically restrained as American patients, 600 times as likely as Australians and 3,200 times as likely as New Zealanders.”
A study by Prof. Toshio Hasegawa, as published in the Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences journal
This article is by Simon Denyer and has been published in The Washington Post. It begins:
“KANAZAWA, Japan — Kazuya Ohata had problems sleeping and had voluntarily checked into a psychiatric ward on several occasions after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. But a 2016 visit, at the age of 40, proved to be his last.
Eight days after being admitted, he was tied to his bed. Six days later, after being released from the restraint, he died.
His parents, father Masahiro, 70, and mother Sumiko, 68, said they tried to visit their son at the hospital at least seven times, but were turned away. They were never informed, they say, that he had been restrained. Then, two weeks after their son had been admitted, they received a phone call to say he had died.
‘Our greatest regret is that we couldn’t see him,’ said Masahiro, speaking at the family home in the city of Kanazawa, about 180 miles northwest of Tokyo. ‘If we had seen him, we would have realized what had happened and taken him home before anything happened.’ …”
You can read more from here.
