[Retrospective study of restraining measures in a population of patients admitted under a regimen of involuntary...

The application of the 06-26-1990 law for the protection of mentally ill persons has confronted the psychiatrists working in general psychiatry wards with the problem of keeping up patients hospitalized against their own will and following a judiciary authority decision. Having to deal with this problem, the authors first reviewed the literature about the use of restraint techniques in psychiatry. They observed that these universally used techniques were strikingly denied in the psychiatric literature so that their accurate application was made difficult because of the lack of information about their indications, contra-indications and application modalities. Afterwards, the authors have compared the different restraint techniques in a retrospective study over a one year period among voluntarily hospitalized patients and patients admitted against their wil in application of the 06-26-1990 law. They reported that the application of the law undoubtedly increased the number of restraint but did not modify either the population characteristics of the treatment modalities. These results have to be further confirmed in a prospective study.