creative calm

Creative calm
Salem facility has reined in restraint
By peter korn
The Portland Tribune, Feb 5, 2008

excerpts:
***
At Salem Hospital, practicing as normal meant using the twin tools of
restraint and seclusion — tying patients down and forcing them to stay
alone in their rooms, sometimes for days.

Restraint of patients with mental illness became a Portland issue in
December, after a federal report found that Scappoose resident Glenn
Shipman Jr. had died from asphyxiation after being restrained by staff
in the psychiatric unit at Legacy Emanuel Hospital & Health Center.
***

A large, muscular patient was shouting from his bedside at a nurse,
yelling that he would not take his medication.

The patient was no stranger to the psychiatric unit staff. He had been
treated at the hospital several times before. Each time had ended with
his being placed in restraint.

"This guy was on the other side of the bed in his fighting stance,
kind of rocking back and forth," Bennington-Davis recalls.

But the nurses had hatched a plan that didn't call for fighting. They
gathered together at the foot of the patient's bed and began a
three-part harmony version of "God Bless America."

"It was so stunning," Bennington-Davis says. "I watched the man: He
was very tense, and he just relaxed. We laughed, and you could see it
happening in the patient, too. He looked so bewildered, like, `What do
I do now?' They held out the little glass of water and his pills, and
he just took them."

Bennington-Davis says she knew at that moment that Salem Hospital was
on the verge of creating a new way of dealing with people suffering
psychosis.